BUSE - A block device in user space

Adam Cozzette
Fall 2011

This piece of code was inspired by FUSE, which allows the development of Linux
file systems that run in user space. The goal of BUSE is to allow virtual block
devices to run in user space as well.

Currently BUSE is a work in progress and the existing code is hacked together.
Soon I hope to finish implementing everything robustly.

Implementing a block device with BUSE is fairly straightforward. Simply fill
struct buse_operations (declared in buse.h) with function pointers that define
the behavior of the block device, and set the size field to be the desired size
of the device in bytes. Then call buse_main and pass it a pointer to this
struct. busexmp.c is a simple example example that shows how this is done.

The implementation of BUSE itself relies on NBD, the Linux network block device,
which allows a remote machine to serve requests for reads and writes to a
virtual block device on the local machine. BUSE sets up an NBD server and client
on the same machine, with the server running executing the code defined by the
BUSE user.