A file system is part of the operating system and defines an interface between OS and the computer's storage devices. It is used to control how the computer names, stores and basically organises the files and directories. Due to many different requirements, such as efficient usage of the storage, a grand variety of approaches arose. The most important ones are running in the kernel as this has been the only way for a long time. In 1994, developers came up with an idea which would allow mounting a file system in the user space. The FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) project was started in 2004 and implemented in the Linux kernel by 2005. This provides the opportunity for a user to write an own file system without editing the kernel code and therefore avoid licence problems. Additionally, FUSE offers a stable library interface. It is originally implemented as a loadable kernel module. Due to its design, all operations have to pass through the kernel multiple times. The additional data transfer and the context switches are causing some overhead which will be analysed in this thesis. So, there will be a basic overview about on how exactly a file system operation takes place and which mount options for a FUSE-based system result in a better performance. Therefore, an overview is given on how the related operating system internals work as well as a detailed presentation of the kernel file systems mechanisms such as the system call. Thereby a comparison of kernel file systems, such as tmpfs and ZFS, and user space file systems, such as memfs and ZFS-FUSE is enabled. This thesis shows the kernel version 3.16 offers great improvements for every file system analysed. The meta data operations even of a file system like tmpfs raised by a maximum of 25%. Increasing the writing performance of memfs from about 220 MB/s to 2 600 MB/s, the write-back cache has an enormous impact with a factor of 12. All in all, the performance of the FUSE-based file systems improved dramatically, transforming user space file systems in an alternative for native kernel file systems altough they still can not keep up in every aspect.

@misc{COKAUSFSD14,
	author	 = {Kira Duwe},
	title	 = {{Comparison of kernel and user space file systems}},
	advisors	 = {Michael Kuhn},
	year	 = {2014},
	month	 = {08},
	school	 = {Universität Hamburg},
	howpublished	 = {{Online \url{http://edoc.sub.uni-hamburg.de/informatik/volltexte/2015/210/pdf/bac_duwe.pdf}}},
	type	 = {Bachelor's Thesis},
	abstract	 = {A file system is part of the operating system and defines an interface between OS and the computer's storage devices. It is used to control how the computer names, stores and basically organises the files and directories. Due to many different requirements, such as efficient usage of the storage, a grand variety of approaches arose. The most important ones are running in the kernel as this has been the only way for a long time. In 1994, developers came up with an idea which would allow mounting a file system in the user space. The FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) project was started in 2004 and implemented in the Linux kernel by 2005. This provides the opportunity for a user to write an own file system without editing the kernel code and therefore avoid licence problems. Additionally, FUSE offers a stable library interface. It is originally implemented as a loadable kernel module. Due to its design, all operations have to pass through the kernel multiple times. The additional data transfer and the context switches are causing some overhead which will be analysed in this thesis. So, there will be a basic overview about on how exactly a file system operation takes place and which mount options for a FUSE-based system result in a better performance. Therefore, an overview is given on how the related operating system internals work as well as a detailed presentation of the kernel file systems mechanisms such as the system call. Thereby a comparison of kernel file systems, such as tmpfs and ZFS, and user space file systems, such as memfs and ZFS-FUSE is enabled. This thesis shows the kernel version 3.16 offers great improvements for every file system analysed. The meta data operations even of a file system like tmpfs raised by a maximum of 25\%. Increasing the writing performance of memfs from about 220 MB/s to 2 600 MB/s, the write-back cache has an enormous impact with a factor of 12. All in all, the performance of the FUSE-based file systems improved dramatically, transforming user space file systems in an alternative for native kernel file systems altough they still can not keep up in every aspect.},
	url	 = {http://edoc.sub.uni-hamburg.de/informatik/volltexte/2015/210/},
}