wimlib

Hi synchronisity,
It's been a while since I've been here. wimlib remains my primary tool for managing .wim files. It's rock solid stable and has never failed me. The only thing that is missing is the ability to mount in Windows.

A developer I have been working with mentioned the following -

By the way, I researched about wimlib's mount capability, it depends on FUSE driver/library.
WinFSP implements FUSE API over native windows, and it is already signed. It is licensed under GPLv3 with FOSS exception, so it can be linked against wimlib.

If a experiment using WinFSP with wimlib succeed, traditional mount scheme can be used.

What are your thoughts on this? And is WinFSP (https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp) a potential option for adding wimlib mount capabilities to Windows?

The developer in question plans to explore this himself, however he is very busy with his own projects, so I thought I'd raise the subject here.

Best wishes,

Misty

That would be really helpful indeed. I hope it's really doable.

@misty However some features of NTFS are not supported by WinFSP https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp/b ... y.asciidoc . Most of the limitations could be avoided by writing a user-mode driver, but I'm not sure it would bring more than directly writing a driver from scratch? For it to be really useful, it should at least offer a full compatibility with NTFS-3g.
The author says hardlinks are not used much, but that's not true. A standard windows install is full of hardlinks and it would make it much bigger to have them all as real duplicates.

bliblubli wrote: ↑Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:48 pm @misty However some features of NTFS are not supported by WinFSP https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp/b ... y.asciidoc . Most of the limitations could be avoided by writing a user-mode driver, but I'm not sure it would bring more than directly writing a driver from scratch? ...

@bliblubli
Thanks for you response. Based upon the following post...

synchronicity wrote: ↑Tue Jan 12, 2016 2:36 am ...I don't plan to implement mount support on Windows. Besides the large effort required, I understand that there is no way to create virtual filesystems without having a driver signed by Microsoft. This is in contrast to Linux where anyone can implement filesystems in userspace.

...the advantage might be a signed driver?

My knowledge in this area is pretty limited. Synchronicity can give a much better answer here.
Maybe the best way would be to make the WinFSP coders aware of the features required for full Wimlib support and see if they can add the missing bits.