Mainline Linux Kernel Almost Ready For Finally Supporting Unprivileged FUSE Mounts

While the Linux 4.17 merge window officially closed yesterday with the release of Linux 4.17-rc1, FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi is now trying to get his changes added.

With FUSE (File-Systems in User-Space) updates being uncommon these days, Miklos forgot about sending them into the Linux 4.17 merge window but today is trying to get them added.

The FUSE updates hoped for Linux 4.17 only touch around 100 lines of code and have some fixes as well as minor improvements. The most prominent item though is user name-space support by Eric Biederman of Red Hat.

The user name-space support is a step towards allowing unprivileged mounting of FUSE file-systems. Miklos noted,
"This doesn't yet enable unprivileged mounting of fuse filesystems, but that's now a really simple step, since all support for that should be in place."

There have been patches going back a decade for allowing FUSE unprivileged mounts but not mainlined, including patches carried by the Ubuntu kernel for allowing this functionality. But it's looking like for Linux 4.18 or sometime soon we might be seeing this unprivileged mounting of FUSE file-systems finally materialize for mainline.

The list of proposed FUSE updates hoped for Linux 4.17 can be found via this pull request but it remains to be seen if Linus Torvalds will honor this tardy request... Especially as this isn't one of his favorite areas of the kernel -- in the past he's referred to FUSE as just for toys and misguided people.