15.6. Exposing GNOME Virtual File Systems to All Other Applications

In addition to applications built with the GIO library being able to access GVFS mounts, GVFS also provides a FUSE daemon which exposes active GVFS mounts. This means that any application can access active GVFS mounts using the standard POSIX APIs as though they were regular filesystems.

Nevertheless, there are applications in which additional library dependency and new VFS subsystem specifics may be unsuitable or too complex. For such reasons and to boost compatibility, GVFS provides a FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) daemon, which exposes active mounts through its mount for standard POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) access. This daemon transparently translates incoming requests to imitate a local file system for applications.

The FUSE daemon starts automatically with the GVFS master daemon and places its mount either in the /run/user/UID/gvfs or ~/.gvfs files as a fallback. Manual browsing shows that there individual directories for each GVFS mount. When you are opening documents from GVFS locations with non-native applications, a transformed path is passed as an argument. Note that native GIO applications automatically translate this path back to a native URI.