9pfs mounts a 9P service using the FUSE file system driver. It is a replacement for 9pfuse from plan9port. Unlike 9pfuse, it works equally well on Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and any other OS with a FUSE implementation.

It is also faster than 9pfuse. Below is the time it took to run du -a on the /sys/src directory on a plan9front installation mounted by 9pfs.

$ time du -a >/dev/null
real    0m8.952s
user    0m0.180s
sys     0m0.503s
$ time du -a >/dev/null
real    0m0.421s
user    0m0.017s
sys     0m0.070s
$ time du -a >/dev/null
real    0m0.421s
user    0m0.030s
sys     0m0.060s

The first time trial above is slow as 9pfs builds a cache as it reads directories. The second and third trials are subsequently much faster.

Below is the time it takes for 9pfuse:

$ time du -a >/dev/null
real    1m2.643s
user    0m0.323s
sys     0m0.833s
$ time du -a >/dev/null
real    1m15.849s
user    0m0.287s
sys     0m0.790s
$ time du -a >/dev/null
real    1m20.581s
user    0m0.297s
sys     0m0.753s

Installation

If you are using OpenBSD, then

$ make
$ sudo make install

will perform the installation. If you are using another operating system of your choice, edit the the BIN and MAN variables of the Makefile to choose where you want to install the 9pfs binary and man page, respectively.