As a consequence of its monolithic design, file system code for Linux normally goes into the kernel itself---which is not only a robustness issue, but also an impediment to system extensibility. FUSE, for "file systems in user space", is a kernel module and user-space library that tries to address part of this problem by allowing users to run file system implementations as user-space processes.

As a consequence of its monolithic design, file system code for Linux normally goes into the kernel itself---which is not only a robustness issue, but also an impediment to system extensibility. FUSE, for "file systems in user space", is a kernel module and user-space library that tries to address part of this problem by allowing users to run file system implementations as user-space processes.