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

27 points by neogoose 3 days ago|28 comments

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neogoose 3 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 3 hours 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.

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andai 21 minutes ago

>clankers can not run sudo commands

Do you mean the harnesses prevent it? Or it can't type a password or something?

I've been running mine as root on a disposable VPS. (Finally I have a dedicated linux guy!)

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fragmede 3 days ago

When they can't run sudo, they'll user docker to give themselves root.

https://twitter.com/i/status/2060746160558543217

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cyberax 35 minutes ago

That's why everyone should use rootless Podman. It doesn't need anything apart from subuid/subgid binaries.

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goodmythical 3 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 3 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'.

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daymanstep 3 hours ago

Clankers absolutely can run sudo if you have passwordless sudo

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Wowfunhappy 3 hours 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 3 hours ago

Y’all aren’t running your agents as root?

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helterskelter 2 hours ago

Real men run as root:

https://www.garyshood.com/root/

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jgalt212 2 hours ago

Has anyone run a study on how long you can run an agent as root before irreparable damage is done to the VM? A sort of gambler's ruin for the YOLO LLM Age.

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nijave 41 minutes ago

I gave Sonnet 4.6 root access to my Android via adb and it wrote frida scripts to help me recover the encryption keys from SwiftBackup

Also gave Opus 4.6 access to a Kubernetes container and it was able to use pyrasite (a Python replacement that attached to a running process with gdb) to debug a "memory leak" in Python

I don't think I'd let them run unattended on anything I care about especially if there weren't backups, but they've never tried to break anything while supervised.

Usually it's significantly faster and more accurate to give the LLM/harness access to the thing to debug then to try to copy/paste back and forth.

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andai 19 minutes ago

It's been a while but last year I'd see posts like "Claude nuked my homedir / entire drive" on a regular basis. I don't know if they fixed that (or just made it very rare).

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Wowfunhappy 57 minutes ago

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/screw-it-lets-make-clau...

For me, it took a bit over six weeks of Claude running unattended perpetually.

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ktimespi 3 hours ago

Pretty cool to read it directly from the associated device XD

Did you write a metadata parser for most of the filesystems?

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lantastic 3 hours 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?

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watusername 47 minutes ago

> bypassing OS kernel

> reading a raw device node (e.g. /dev/rdisk*)

That's... not bypassing the kernel. Time to integrate SPDK so it actually bypasses the kernel :)

https://spdk.io

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Retr0id 3 hours ago

It might bypass the fs, but it does not bypass the kernel. Cool, though!

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kasabali 3 hours 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 2 hours ago

I assume the author just meant SSD as a synonym for "main internal disk", since that is usually an SSD these days.

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neogoose 2 hours ago

yeah I was just picking up an interesting the title for hn, you should read a README to get the actual understanding of project

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wk_end 2 hours 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 :)

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4petesake 3 hours ago

But can it match the speed and reliability of the venerable Windows Search?

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lunar_rover 43 minutes ago

The repo summary has multiple typos.

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amelius 3 hours 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 3 hours ago

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

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drewg123 2 hours 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).