Microsoft and GitHub bringing GVFS to macOS and Linux

November 18, 2017

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Yes, this picture explains everything.

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That plan appears to be going well. Yesterday, the company announced that GitHub was adopting its modifications and that the two would be working together to bring suitable clients to macOS and Linux.

Internally, this proved successful, with Windows development being substantially migrated to Git in May of this year. But what of the broader Git community?

GitHub's interest and involvement is motivated by the company's desire to address the needs of enterprise customers. The open source, free GitHub hosting doesn't need the scaling work Microsoft has done—obviously, if someone is using standard Git, today then standard Git must be good enough for their development process. But on the paid, enterprise side, the situation can be a little different. Certain industries have large repositories that pose problems with Git; for example, game repositories are often physically large not because they have millions of files and decades of history, but because of their large number of graphics and other assets. The scaling improvements that Microsoft has made to Git are useful for this kind of large repository, too. As such, having the same family of improvements available in GitHub will enable the company to better serve these communities.

As the name would imply, GVFS requires a file system driver to work. The Windows division worked with the engineering team to add features to Windows to make this efficient. The intent is to eventually make this capability into a supported, extensible API and, at some point, move systems such as the new OneDrive placeholders to use the same API.

Microsoft and GitHub are also working to bring similar capabilities to other platforms, with macOS coming first, and later Linux. The obvious way to do this on both systems is to use FUSE, an infrastructure for building file systems that run in user mode rather than kernel mode (desirable because user-mode development is easier and safer than kernel mode). However, the companies have discovered that FUSE isn't fast enough for this—a lesson Dropbox also learned when developing a similar capability, Project Infinite. Currently, the companies believe that tapping into a macOS extensibility mechanism called Kauth (or KAuth) will be the best way forward.

While I don't work on any projects large enough that would necessitate these changes, its nice to see that Github wants to adopt them and Microsoft is willing to assist them. Knowing how journalism works these days, I'm prepared for the memes/jokes/articles on Microsoft developing Windows on macOS and Linux when this is unrelated. Just keep in mind that this is to allow other developers to take advantage of the scaling improvements used for developing Windows (300GB codebase and 3000 active devs). Also curious to see if placeholders in OneDrive will become more reliable with this (All of my files on OneDrive are saved offline so I haven't had the chance to test the new version in W10, but did experience W7's version)

I recommend reading the original(?) article as I gutted it down so that I don't quote the whole thing.

Source (Ars Technica)