Ubuntu Manpage: fuse - configuration and mount options for FUSE file systems

NAME

       fuse - configuration and mount options for FUSE file systems

DESCRIPTION

       FUSE  (Filesystem  in  Userspace) is a simple interface for userspace programs to export a
       virtual filesystem to the Linux kernel. FUSE also aims to provide a secure method for  non
       privileged users to create and mount their own filesystem implementations.

DEFINITIONS

       FUSE   The in-kernel filesystem that forwards requests to a user-space process.

       filesystem
              The user-space process that responds to requests received from the kernel.

       libfuse
              The  shared library that most (user-space) filesystems use to communicate with FUSE
              (the kernel filesystem). libfuse also provides the fusermount3  (or  fusermount  if
              you  have  older  version of libfuse) helper to allow non-privileged users to mount
              filesystems.

       filesystem owner
              The user that starts the filesystem and instructs the kernel to associate it with a
              particular  mountpoint.  The  latter  is typically done by the filesystem itself on
              start-up. When using libfuse, this is done by calling the fusermount3 utility.

       client Any process that interacts with the mountpoint.

CONFIGURATION

       Some options regarding mount policy can be set in the file /etc/fuse.conf. Currently these
       options are:

       mount_max = NNN
              Set  the  maximum  number  of FUSE mounts allowed to non-root users. The default is
              1000.

       user_allow_other
              Allow non-root users to specify the allow_other or allow_root  mount  options  (see
              below).

       These limits are enforced by the fusermount3 helper, so they can be avoided by filesystems
       that run as root.

OPTIONS

Most of the generic mount options described in mount are supported (ro, rw, suid, nosuid,
dev, nodev, exec, noexec, atime, noatime, sync, async, dirsync). Filesystems are mounted
with nodev,nosuid by default, which can only be overridden by a privileged user.

General mount options:
These are FUSE specific mount options that can be specified for all filesystems:

default_permissions
This option instructs the kernel to perform its own permission check instead of
deferring all permission checking to the filesystem. The check by the kernel is
done in addition to any permission checks by the filesystem, and both have to
succeed for an operation to be allowed. The kernel performs a standard UNIX
permission check (based on mode bits and ownership of the directory entry, and
uid/gid of the client).

This mount option is activated implicitly if the filesystem enables ACL support
during the initial feature negotiation when opening the device fd. In this case,
the kernel performs both ACL and standard unix permission checking.

Filesystems that do not implement any permission checking should generally add this
option internally.

allow_other
This option overrides the security measure restricting file access to the
filesystem owner, so that all users (including root) can access the files.

rootmode=M
Specifies the file mode of the filesystem's root (in octal representation).

blkdev Mount a filesystem backed by a block device. This is a privileged option. The
device must be specified with the fsname=NAME option.

blksize=N
Set the block size for the filesystem. This option is only valid for 'fuseblk' type
mounts. The default is 512.

In most cases, this option should not be specified by the filesystem owner but set
internally by the filesystem.

max_read=N
With this option the maximum size of read operations can be set. The default is
infinite, but typically the kernel enforces its own limit in addition to this one.
A value of zero corresponds to no limit.

This option should not be specified by the filesystem owner. The correct (or
optimum) value depends on the filesystem implementation and should thus be set by
the filesystem internally.

This mount option is deprecated in favor of direct negotiation over the device fd
(as done for e.g. the maximum size of write operations). For the time being,
libfuse-using filesystems that want to limit the read size must therefore use this
mount option and set the same value again in the init() handler.

fd=N The file descriptor to use for communication between the userspace filesystem and
the kernel. The file descriptor must have been obtained by opening the FUSE device
(/dev/fuse).

This option should not be specified by the filesystem owner. It is set by libfuse
(or, if libfuse is not used, must be set by the filesystem itself).

user_id=N
group_id=N Specifies the numeric uid/gid of the mount owner.

This option should not be specified by the filesystem owner. It is set by libfuse
(or, if libfuse is not used, must be set by the filesystem itself).

fsname=NAME
Sets the filesystem source (first field in /etc/mtab). The default is the name of
the filesystem process.

subtype=TYPE
Sets the filesystem type (third field in /etc/mtab). The default is the name of the
filesystem process. If the kernel supports it, /etc/mtab and /proc/mounts will show
the filesystem type as fuse.TYPE

If the kernel doesn't support subtypes, the source field will be TYPE#NAME, or if
fsname option is not specified, just TYPE.

libfuse-specific mount options:
These following options are not actually passed to the kernel but interpreted by libfuse.
They can be specified for all filesystems that use libfuse:

allow_root
This option is similar to allow_other but file access is limited to the filesystem
owner and root. This option and allow_other are mutually exclusive.

auto_unmount
This option enables automatic release of the mountpoint if filesystem terminates
for any reason. Normally the filesystem is responsible for releasing the
mountpoint, which means that the mountpoint becomes inaccessible if the filesystem
terminates without first unmounting.

At the moment, this option implies that the filesystem will also be mounted with
nodev and nosuid (even when mounted by root). This restriction may be lifted in the
future.

High-level mount options:
These following options are not actually passed to the kernel but interpreted by libfuse.
They can only be specified for filesystems that use the high-level libfuse API:

kernel_cache
This option disables flushing the cache of the file contents on every open(2).
This should only be enabled on filesystems, where the file data is never changed
externally (not through the mounted FUSE filesystem). Thus it is not suitable for
network filesystems and other "intermediate" filesystems.

NOTE: if this option is not specified (and neither direct_io) data is still cached
after the open(2), so a read(2) system call will not always initiate a read
operation.

auto_cache
This option is an alternative to kernel_cache. Instead of unconditionally keeping
cached data, the cached data is invalidated on open(2) if the modification time or
the size of the file has changed since it was last opened.

umask=M
Override the permission bits in st_mode set by the filesystem. The resulting
permission bits are the ones missing from the given umask value. The value is
given in octal representation.

uid=N Override the st_uid field set by the filesystem (N is numeric).

gid=N Override the st_gid field set by the filesystem (N is numeric).

entry_timeout=T
The timeout in seconds for which name lookups will be cached. The default is 1.0
second. For all the timeout options, it is possible to give fractions of a second
as well (e.g. entry_timeout=2.8)

negative_timeout=T
The timeout in seconds for which a negative lookup will be cached. This means, that
if file did not exist (lookup returned ENOENT), the lookup will only be redone
after the timeout, and the file/directory will be assumed to not exist until then.
The default is 0.0 second, meaning that caching negative lookups are disabled.

attr_timeout=T
The timeout in seconds for which file/directory attributes are cached. The default
is 1.0 second.

ac_attr_timeout=T
The timeout in seconds for which file attributes are cached for the purpose of
checking if auto_cache should flush the file data on open. The default is the
value of attr_timeout

noforget

remember=T
Normally, libfuse assigns inodes to paths only for as long as the kernel is aware
of them. With this option inodes are instead assigned for at least T seconds (or,
in the case of noforget, the life-time of the filesystem). This will require more
memory, but may be necessary when using applications that make use of inode
numbers.

modules=M1[:M2...]
Add modules to the filesystem stack. Modules are pushed in the order they are
specified, with the original filesystem being on the bottom of the stack.

mount.fuse3 options:
These options are interpreted by mount.fuse3 and are thus only available when mounting a
file system via mount.fuse3 (such as when mounting via the generic mount(1) command or
/etc/fstab). Supported options are:

setuid=USER
Switch to USER and its primary group before launching the FUSE file system process.
mount.fuse3 must be run as root or with CAP_SETUID and CAP_SETGID for this to work.

drop_privileges
Perform setup of the FUSE file descriptor and mounting the file system before
launching the FUSE file system process. mount.fuse3 requires privilege to do so,
i.e. must be run as root or at least with CAP_SYS_ADMIN and CAP_SETPCAP. It will
launch the file system process fully unprivileged, i.e. without capabilities(7) and
prctl(2) flags set up such that privileges can't be reacquired (e.g. via setuid or
fscaps binaries). This reduces risk in the event of the FUSE file system process
getting compromised by malicious file system data.

FUSE MODULES (STACKING)

       Modules are filesystem stacking support to high level API. Filesystem modules can be built
       into libfuse or loaded from shared object

   iconv
       Perform file name character set conversion.  Options are:

       from_code=CHARSET
              Character set to convert from (see iconv -l for a list of possible values). Default
              is UTF-8.

       to_code=CHARSET
              Character set to convert to.  Default is determined by the current locale.

   subdir
       Prepend a given directory to each path. Options are:

       subdir=DIR
              Directory to prepend to all paths.  This option is mandatory.

       rellinks
              Transform absolute symlinks into relative

       norellinks
              Do not transform absolute symlinks into relative.  This is the default.

SECURITY

       The fusermount3 program is installed set-user-gid to fuse. This is  done  to  allow  users
       from fuse group to mount their own filesystem implementations.  There must however be some
       limitations, in order to prevent Bad  User  from  doing  nasty  things.   Currently  those
       limitations are:

       1.     The user can only mount on a mountpoint, for which it has write permission

       2.     The  mountpoint  is not a sticky directory which isn't owned by the user (like /tmp
              usually is)

       3.     No other user (including root) can access the contents of the mounted filesystem.

NOTE

       FUSE  filesystems  are  unmounted  using  the  fusermount3(1)  command   (fusermount3   -u
       mountpoint).

AUTHORS

       FUSE is currently maintained by Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org>

       The original author of FUSE is Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@inf.bme.hu>.

       This      man     page     was     originally     written     by     Bastien     Roucaries
       <roucaries.bastien+debian@gmail.com> for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.