Re: [PATCH 0/5 -v2] Add support for VMUFAT filesystem

[Jan Kara]

On Wed 15-04-26 21:08:21, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 at 16:09, Pedro Falcato <pfalcato@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 11, 2026 at 04:11:34PM +0100, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> > > SEGA Dreamcasts come with a "visual memory unit" (VMU) which contains a slab
> > > of flash memory to save games playable on the VMU or data from Dreamcast games.
> > >
> ...
> > >
> > > These patches implement VMUFAT as a Linux filesystem independent of hardware.
> >
> > Isn't this filesystem a great target for FUSE? You definitely don't need
> > super high performance here.
> >
> > Also, you're missing the fs maintainers. Adding them.
> 
> Apologies for the long delay in replying - I was hoping that maybe
> someone else would have a view rather than my rather inevitable "can
> this go in mainline, please?".

Thanks for your work and the filesystem driver but I have to say I agree
with Pedro here. A FUSE driver is a much better way of providing access to
a filesystem like this. Each filesystem in the kernel adds certain
maintenance burden to treewide changes as it needs to be adapted as well
and over the years the niche filesystems that have accumulated in the
kernel make the treewide changes rather painful and we are rather slowly
removing such filesystems from the kernel than adding more.

With a FUSE driver you get very similar user experience as with in-kernel
driver - you can just mount the device and tinker with the content - while
keeping your code in a userspace library which removes the maintenance
burden for the kernel and frankly makes your life simpler as well. The
performance is somewhat lower due to additional communication and process
switching but for cases like your filesystem I don't expect it to matter.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR