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GVfs

Stable release	1.57.2[1]  / 14 February 2025
Repository	gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs.git
Operating system	Linux
Platform	GNOME
Type	abstraction layer for the files system
License	LGPL-2.0-or-later
Website	gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs

GVfs (abbreviation forGNOME virtual file system) isGNOME's userspacevirtual filesystem designed to work with the I/O abstraction ofGIO, a library available inGLib since version 2.15.1. It installs several modules that are automatically used by applications using the APIs of libgio. There is alsoFUSE support that allows applications not using GIO to access the GVfs filesystems.

A cause of confusion is the fact that thefile system abstraction used by theLinux kernel is also called thevirtual file system (VFS) layer. This is however at a lower level.

The GVfs model differs from e.g.GnomeVFS, which it replaces, in that file systems must be mounted before they are used. There is a master daemon (gvfsd) that handles coordinating mounts, and then each mount is (typically) in its own daemon process (although mounts can share daemon process).

GVfs comes with a set of back-ends, including trash support,SFTP,FTP,WebDAV,SMB, and local data viaUdev integration,OBEX,MTP and others.^[2] GVfs does not seem to support theFiles transferred over shell protocol (FISH).

GVfs also contains modules forGIO that implement volume monitors and the GNOME URI scheme handler configuration.

There is a set of arguments to the command line program "gio" that lets you run commands (like cat, ls, stat, mount, etc.) on files in the GVfs mounts.

Attached resources are exposed via aURI syntax, for example smb://server01/gamedata or ftp://username:password@ftp.example.net/public_html, but are alsomounted in the traditional manner under~/.gvfs/ or/run/user/$UID/gvfs or$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gvfs directory^[3][4] to make them available to applications using standardPOSIX commands and I/O.

Along with generally useful APIs such as networking and D-Bus support,GIO also provides a VFS API to applications. GVfs provides implementations that go beyond that and allow to access files and storage using many protocols. GVfs provides implementations for various network file systems as loadable modules. Additionally GVfs also provides support for trash, network or recent folders, for CD burning and for monitoring interesting devices and volumes on the computer.

The goal of GVfs has been to overcome the shortcomings of GnomeVFS^[6] and provide an API that is so good that developers prefer it over raw POSIX calls. Among other things that means using GObject. It also means not cloning the POSIX API, but providing higher-level, document-centric interfaces. GTK can directly use it, e.g. in the filechooser.

Applications use GVfs indirectly, by means of GIO loading the GVfs module that implements the GIO extension points. The GVfs main daemon gvfsd spawns further mount daemons for each individual connection. The GVfs support for volume monitoring is included in a separate loadable module.

The actual GVfs implementation is distributed over a number of processes.

GVfs can useFUSE to mount its VFS directly onto the filesystem.^[7] It consists of two parts:^[8]

1. a shared library which is loaded by applications supportingGIO
2. GVfs itself, which contains a collection ofdaemons which communicate with each other and the GIO module overD-Bus.

A collection of command-line utilities (such as gvfs-mount, gvfs-less) works with VFS resources.^[9]

• https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/ch01.html#gvfs-overview

Please refer tohttps://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/gvfs/backends for the official documentation.

Devices connected over eSATA or USB are (supposed to be) physicallyhot-pluggable. When a device is physically connected to or physically removed from the computer system, theLinux kernel notices and sends out an event to user-space.systemd-udevd receives such events and responds to them according to its quite comprehensive configuration:

• manages the special file system devfs mounted to/dev, hence systemd-udevd dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev, it also loads drivers as necessary at boot time
• in case of a block device systemd-udevd notifiesudisksd, andgvfsd andgvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.^[12]

The udisks2 daemonudisksd serves as an interface to system block devices, implemented via D-Bus. It handles operations such as querying, mounting, unmounting, formatting, or detaching storage devices such as hard disks or USB thumb drives. This package also provides theudisksctl utility, which can be used to trigger these operations from the command line (if permitted byPolicyKit).

InDebian the GVfs ispackaged into four packages:gvfs,gvfs-daemons,gvfs-bin andgvfs-backends.

• GNOME Files, the file manager forGNOME desktops, allows users to interact with GVfs filesystems
• Thunar, the file manager for the Xfce desktop environment, also provides filesytem abstraction using the GVfs library
• KIO, a similar facility forKDE systems
• Archivemount, a virtual filesystem implementation specifically for accessingarchive files

• Official website

• Applications using D-Bus
• GNOME
• Software that uses Meson

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