Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Universal Binary
Parallels using MacFUSE to access NTFS
As soon as Parallels 3.0 introduced the Explorer tool, letting you get inside your virtual drive images without running the installed virtual OS, I began to wonder: exactly how are they doing that? A few forum threads and a couple of serendipitous error screenshots later, I have an answer -- Parallels 3 includes a build of the MacFUSE project, Google's open source version of the Linux FUSE filesystem extension libraries. With MacFUSE (and the GUI version, MacFusion) you can quickly mount 'disks' that read from SSH, FTP, Spotlight queries, or even files stashed in the quirky gmailfs Gmail storage hack. Very nice to see the efforts of the Google coders making it into a high-profile commercial app.
Here's the teensy little problem: Parallels is using version 0.3 of the MacFUSE libraries, and the current version is 0.4, so anyone who has installed the latest build of MacFUSE and tries to upgrade to Parallels 3 is going to run into the troubles. While the speed coders at SWsoft's offices are undoubtedly going to upgrade to the latest tools sooner rather than later, your best bet is to uninstall MacFUSE if you plan to use Parallels until the incompatibility is cleared up.
Thanks Rich & Aron
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
artifex said 9:10PM on 6-21-2007
If they are using anything but the generic build, are they submitting patches and stuff back to the team? Have they given public credit to MacFuse? You've just tapped the surface. Run with it. Dig up whether they're doing what they should be doing. :)
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Mark said 9:29PM on 6-21-2007
I kind of assumed this was known, I've had several error messages about MacFUSE related errors and guessed that it was already mentioned in some documentation or feature listing I'd never read. Good to see it brought to light for others that were lucky enough to avoid these errors, of course.
Also, this is interesting as I'd seen others complaining about MacFUSE issues with 3.0 installed, but at the time nobody had mentioned that it was actually part of 3.0 or a version behind the main release. Artifex is right, there should be an inquiry as to the use of this in Parallels and if the company is respecting the software's original license.
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Michael Rose said 10:29PM on 6-21-2007
I'll find out what I can.
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Michael Rose said 10:29PM on 6-21-2007
I'll find out what I can.
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artifex said 3:06AM on 6-22-2007
Ahh, looking closer, MacFUSE is released under the New BSD license. So it might be a non-issue. However, from what I've read elsewhere, MacFUSE source contains references to both GPL and APSL. If that's true and any modifications to those portions of the codebase took place, then they would still have some obligations. It's complicated :)
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Jonathan Grynspan said 3:35AM on 6-22-2007
I wrote one of the classes that MacFUSE uses (GTResourceFork), and I can't help but notice that Parallels does not include me in the credits. GTResourceFork is licenced under the old MIT licence.
Though it may seem trivial, I believe this may be a licence violation. :(
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John Laur said 12:26PM on 6-22-2007
FWIW VMware has their own NTFS implementation that could do this, so assuming they mirror the features of Parallels I would assume such a feature to be not too far off for those of us going with the incumbent.
(VMWare's NTFS code is in VirtualCenter's deployment tool and also probably part of their P2V products)
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Billifer said 9:19PM on 6-22-2007
It may merely be a difference in how I'm using Parallels 3.0, but I haven't had any difficulty with it butting heads with MacFUSE 0.4 which I've installed manually.
As for the license issue, that could get hairy especially if there's an APSL violation.
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SS said 5:42AM on 6-23-2007
Jonathan, MacFUSE doesn't use the GTResourceFork class!!
Yes, the class is used in the filesystems-objc wrapper code which is in the external branch of the Google project for MacFUSE, but that's just the code they used for MacWorld demos. That's not the same as MacFUSE and is even in a totally different source tree branch. Parallels is using Google's MacFUSE kernel code and library.
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IdiotProof said 9:49PM on 6-24-2007
Funny how everybody credits Google for NTFS read-write support on Mac OS.
The reality is that Google just ported Linux FUSE (the ability to write filesystems in userland) to Mac OS. One FUSE module implements NTFS by glueing the FUSE API to the libntfs-3g API.
But make no mistake, the real work is done by libntfs-3g, whose authors should be credited instead. See http://www.ntfs-3g.org/about.html for details.
Parallels also has the ability to modify an NTFS filesystem from their main binary (i.e. without using MacFUSE). They use it to modify an NTFS Boot Camp volume before booting it in a virtual machine. I wonder what code they use to achieve that.
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andy said 3:32PM on 7-20-2007
Hi, I have 3 windows softwares (2 of them need dongle to run--in flash drive) that I would like to run on Mac with paralles or bootcamp. I have just tried to intall and run 2 of them in a Mac shop with no success. Installation was fine but the software do not work, one of them needs a dongle, and the machine could not see the dongle at all, and kept asking for it. Can anyone please tell me whether or not Windows software with dongle would run in Mac? In case there is some who use them the software are: ASTRA (Wyatt technology), FAST (EdinburgInstruments) and Fluoressence (Jobin Horiba Yvon). Many thanks.
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