This Filesystem is Born to Fail
A new Linux kernel feature called FailFS is expected to land in Linux 7.3, which is a tiny pseudo-filesystem that returns EOPNOTSUPP for every operation, effectively taking away the filesystem. This feature is designed to simplify sandboxing a Linux process by starting with nothing and explicitly handing over the necessary pieces. The goal of FailFS is to provide a simple and secure way to control filesystem access for sandboxed processes.
- ▪FailFS is a pseudo-filesystem that returns EOPNOTSUPP for every operation, meaning operation not supported.
- ▪When a process uses FailFS as its root or current working directory, normal pathname lookup essentially ceases to work.
- ▪FailFS has an interesting consequence of preventing dynamically linked executables from launching due to absolute paths not working.
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| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/08/07/this-filesystem-is-born-to-fail/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:00:13 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T23:00:44.762Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T23:00:44.762Z |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This Filesystem Is Born To Fail No comments by: Al Williams August 7, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy Sandboxing a Linux process usually means spending a lot of effort deciding what it isn’t allowed to see. You might put it in a mount namespace, bind-mount a few directories into place, hide some others, add a chroot, and generally construct a carefully restricted version of the filesystem. But a new Linux kernel feature is about to change all of that. Instead of carefully hiding most of the filesystem, why not just take the filesystem away? That’s essentially the idea behind FailFS, a tiny pseudo-filesystem expected to land in Linux 7.3. As the name suggests, it doesn’t do very much.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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