Hi
Yesterday I bought an external 4TB Seagate drive. I can connect it via a USB3 port and Mint sees it in a file manager window.
Now, when I right-click and select "Properties" I get the following info...
The filesystem is listed as "fuse". What is fuse? Can I use it to copy across my data from a ext4 drive or should I reformat it to ext4?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Apparently NTFS is can be integrated in FUSE. I really don't profess to know. Perhaps Seagate used it so it would be compatible with Unix, Linux. and Windows
The filesystem type fuse or fuseblk is a Linux-sides designation only and "not real" as such.
FUSE is per that Wikipedia link a framework for implementing filesystems in userspace, that is, as a mostly regular program rather than as a kernel driver as is the norm. When a program read/writes a file it does so via calling into the kernel, specifically into a part of it known as the VFS, the Virtual Filesystem Switch, which relays the request to the kernel-based filesystem driver for whichever filesystem type the file in fact lives on. In the case of e.g. ext4 this is the regular ext4 kernel driver which then reads/writes from/to disk directly but in the case of the kernel-based driver fuseblk that driver then turns around again and calls back out to userspace to the program FUSE to handle anything except the eventual raw I/O fully in userspace.
FUSE exists to large degree due to the kernel not wanting to support through in-kernel code just any groovy idea anyone may ever have for an FTP or SMB or MTP or dconf or ... filesystem and in cases like NTFS or exFAT due to not wanting or being unable to import technically or legally problematic code into the kernel. For NTFS it used to be the case that due to the closed nature of Windows an only crummy read-only kernel level Linux driver was available which was quickly deprecated in favour of FUSE-based NTFS-3G which is what we use to this day. I believe I recently heard that that situation may be changing again in the not so distant future when the kernel-based NTFS driver is considered good enough (and for exFAT Samsung has semi-recently donated code to the kernel which Microsoft has signed off on patent-wise). But for now, NTFS on Linux still means the userspace FUSE filesystem NTFS-3G.
The kernel as such doesn't even know or need to know that its kernel-based fuseblk driver is calling out to FUSE which interprets the bag-of-bytes it's pointed at as an NTFS filesystem though, and hence why things such as the displayed dialogue that ask the kernel for information only know "fuse" and no more.
