GVfs

. Screenshot of GNOME Disks. Along with generally useful APIs such as networking and D-Bus support, GIO also provides a VFS API to applications. GVfs provides implementations that go beyond that and allow to access files and storage using many protocols. GVfs provides implementations for various network file systems as loadable modules. Additionally GVfs also provides support for trash, network or recent folders, for CD burning and for monitoring interesting devices and volumes on the computer. The goal of GVfs has been to overcome the shortcomings of GnomeVFS and provide an API that is so good that developers prefer it over raw POSIX calls. Among other things that means using GObject. It also means not cloning the POSIX API, but providing higher-level, document-centric interfaces. GTK can directly use it, e.g. in the filechooser. Applications use GVfs indirectly, by means of GIO loading the GVfs module that implements the GIO extension points. The GVfs main daemon gvfsd spawns further mount daemons for each individual connection. The GVfs support for volume monitoring is included in a separate loadable module. The actual GVfs implementation is distributed over a number of processes. GVfs can use FUSE to mount its VFS directly onto the filesystem. It consists of two parts: • a shared library which is loaded by applications supporting GIO • GVfs itself, which contains a collection of daemons which communicate with each other and the GIO module over D-Bus. A collection of command-line utilities (such as gvfs-mount, gvfs-less) works with VFS resources. • https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/ch01.html#gvfs-overview Please refer to https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/gvfs/backends for the official documentation. Hot plugging Devices connected over eSATA or USB are (supposed to be) physically hot-pluggable. When a device is physically connected to or physically removed from the computer system, the Linux kernel notices and sends out an event to user-space. systemd-udevd receives such events and responds to them according to its quite comprehensive configuration: • manages the special file system devfs mounted to /dev, hence systemd-udevd dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev, it also loads drivers as necessary at boot time • in case of a block device systemd-udevd notifies udisksd, and gvfsd and gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor. The udisks2 daemon udisksd serves as an interface to system block devices, implemented via D-Bus. It handles operations such as querying, mounting, unmounting, formatting, or detaching storage devices such as hard disks or USB thumb drives. This package also provides the udisksctl utility, which can be used to trigger these operations from the command line (if permitted by PolicyKit). Packaging In Debian the GVfs is packaged into four packages: gvfs, gvfs-daemons, gvfs-bin and gvfs-backends. ==See also==