This year's project goes one step further as not only the VFS operations are passed from kernel to userspace, but the full filesystem code is ran in userspace, including memory management (buffer cache!). This allows developing filesystem code in userland with the "normal" kernel interfaces, but no panics if something goes wrong -- a simple core dump, and that's it. To cite from Antti's mail: ``If you want to give it a whirl, upgrade, go to sys/rump, type "make", go to fs/bin/$foofs and run the file system. It should work to a certain degree provided your system comes with puffs. Does it do anything a kernel file system wouldn't do? No .. except the core dump may be smaller and faster and less intrusive. Oh, actually it does one cool trick: you can run it on non-block devices, so you don't need to vnconfig the file system image first (provided, of course, that the file system starts right from the beginning of the image and that you wouldn't need a disklabel).''

For more information, see Antti's first and second email and his Summer-of-Code project page.

[Tags: google-soc, puffs, rump, ukfs]