ZeroFS Turns S3 Buckets Into Linux Filesystems and Block Devices

Source Domain: linuxiac.com

Most people know S3-compatible storage, an object storage that follows Amazon S3’s API model, as a place to keep backups, archives, images, logs, or application data. This includes AWS S3, commercial S3-compatible cloud services, and self-hosted platforms such as Garage, SeaweedFS, and RustFS.

It is cheap, widely available, and works well at large scale, but it does not normally behave like the storage Linux users deal with every day. ZeroFS tries to change that.

It is a new open-source project that presents S3-compatible object storage as Linux-accessible filesystems and block devices, enabling broader use of object storage beyond backup, archival, or application-specific workflows.

In short, ZeroFS operates between the storage backend and the operating system. It serves data as a POSIX-style filesystem over NFS or 9P, or as raw block storage via NBD (the Linux Network Block Device protocol). This allows the same S3-compatible backend to be accessed as files and directories or as a block device that can be formatted with filesystems like ext4 or used by storage stacks such as ZFS.

The project’s main goal is simple: making object storage usable where Linux systems expect filesystem or block-device access. Rather than relying on FUSE mounts or custom S3 API applications, ZeroFS uses protocols already supported by operating systems. According to the documentation, this includes file-level access through NFS and 9P, and block-level access through NBD.

Here’s a little more about them. NFS provides ZeroFS with broad compatibility, as NFS clients are practically available on almost every Unix-like OS. The 9P option targets Linux environments specifically, offering stronger POSIX compliance and advanced caching. NBD (Network Block Device protocol) is unique in that it enables S3-compatible storage to appear as a raw block device.

According to the project’s documentation, NBD devices created by ZeroFS can be used for ext4 filesystems, ZFS…

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