- Sources: primary, discussion
- Summary: Jake Edge's report of the FUSE birds-of-a-feather session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit was published 2026-08-05. Maintainer Miklos Szeredi states that he is good at keeping bugs out and not at letting features in, asked for a co-maintainer with no volunteers, and has started a clean-slate user-space API called fusex at around 2,000 lines against roughly 20,000 for the current one, supporting only local filesystems and synchronous operation, which he would like to become a new major version of the protocol and considers a replacement for FUSE, which he expects can never go away. A transport and filesystem layer separation is already in the upcoming 7.2 kernel along with two new MAINTAINERS subsystems for FUSE io_uring and passthrough naming Bernd Schubert and Amir Goldstein, and pending work Szeredi would route into fusex rather than FUSE includes Darrick Wong's iomap-based API, which the report says would grow FUSE in the kernel by at least 30 percent.
- Why it matters: Container and cloud storage stacks sit on FUSE, and its maintainer is prototyping a replacement protocol rather than extending the current one.
- Follow-up: Track whether fusex is posted to the mailing list and whether a co-maintainer is named.
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