eduFUSE a Visualizer for User-Space File Systems
Luke Thompson, Joel Clarke, Robert Sheehan · 2020
File systems are a significant topic in operating systems courses and a good understanding of them is important for software developers in order to use them well. One way to give students hands-on experience with the file system layers is via simulation, another way is to create a real file system which works with the operating system. Both of these approaches have difficulties. A user-space file system such as FUSE can solve these difficulties. We have developed eduFUSE, a system which provides a GUI interface to user-space file systems on both Linux and macOS. Not only does this system provide improved visualization and easier information filtering than the standard text based user-space file system tools, but it also provides both a C interface and an improved Java interface so that students can use whichever language they prefer to build a realistic file system in a safe environment. Students with experience of standard FUSE rated the GUI interface well above that of the traditional system.