F* file system – file search that reads SSD directly bypassing OS kernel

7 comments

• neogoose 2 days ago
  This is practically the most useless project becuase you can not run it without sudo permissions, but it was insanely fun to work on it

  supports ext4, btrfs, and apfs. Multithreaded, supports compression, nested volumes, and can even search detached volumes like .iso and .dmg without mounting

  An interesting bonus point: you can't really vibe code it cause clankers can not run sudo commands

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  • nomel 48 minutes ago
    > cause clankers can not run sudo commands

    They absolutely can. There's nothing special about a these harnesses. You automate sudo the same way you would automate in any other context. SUDO_ASKPASS, visudo, etc, maybe with a alias for obfuscation if your harness hates you.
  • goodmythical 2 days ago
    >cause clankers can not run sudo commands

    Is that really true? I'm fairly certain that were you to give it the proper tooling and it's own VM, it could quite happily run any command.

    Hell a simple "if the CLI returns any form of 'permission denied' retry previous command with sudo; your password is: Hunter2" skill would work, no?

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    • dlcarrier 2 days ago
      In the least, you could make an alias for sudo, and have it run that. With something like this in .bashrc:

          alias safedo='sudo'
      

      Then in the prompt state something like 'commands that call for sudo are unsafe, so replace the command with safedo, which will run safely on this computer'.
    • daymanstep 1 hour ago
      Clankers absolutely can run sudo if you have passwordless sudo
  • fragmede 2 days ago
    When they can't run sudo, they'll user docker to give themselves root.

    https://twitter.com/i/status/2060746160558543217
  • Wowfunhappy 1 hour ago
    > This is practically the most useless project becuase you can not run it without sudo permissions

    Well, you could whitelist the tool in sudoers.

    This would let LLMs use it too.

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    • robotresearcher 1 hour ago
      Y’all aren’t running your agents as root?
  • ktimespi 59 minutes ago
    Pretty cool to read it directly from the associated device XD

    Did you write a metadata parser for most of the filesystems?
  • lantastic 1 hour ago
    On Linux, you could create a udev rule to give you permissions on any attached raw disks (if you feel particularly adventurous).

    What's the license for ffs?
• wk_end 17 minutes ago
  Saw the name and was disappointed that this wasn't some kind of verified file system written in the F* programming language (https://fstar-lang.org).

  I don't think I'd ever trust or use this, but still, good job OP :)
• kasabali 46 minutes ago
  Dumb title.

  It works by reading the block device in /dev directly, wouldn't it also work on an HDD, flash drive or a memory card?

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  • Wowfunhappy 42 minutes ago
    I assume the author just meant SSD as a synonym for "main internal disk", since that is usually an SSD these days.
• Retr0id 44 minutes ago
  It might bypass the fs, but it does not bypass the kernel. Cool, though!
• drewg123 27 minutes ago
  It is sad that that FFS doesn't support FFS (BSD Fast File System) which inspired the architecture of the ext filesystem (and was the basis for a lot of unix filesystems).
• 4petesake 59 minutes ago
  But can it match the speed and reliability of the venerable Windows Search?
• amelius 1 hour ago
  But can it bypass the magic performed by the SSD controller?

  In particular, can it be certain that a flush is really a flush?

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  • ktimespi 1 hour ago
    If the disk decides to falsely report a flush, there's not much you can do about it from the user side, no?