Kin VFS: Transparent Virtual File System Projection

kin-vfs is the transparent virtual filesystem bridge for the Kin ecosystem. It is the "Trojan horse" that enables legacy, file-first development tools (compilers, linters, legacy text editors, build systems) to operate seamlessly on Kin's graph-first semantic repository.

How It Works

Instead of forcing you to rewrite your toolchain to interact with a graph database API, kin-vfs projects the semantic graph database onto the filesystem.

• Dynamic Interception: By utilizing standard dynamic linking hooks (LD_PRELOAD on Linux or DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES/DYLD_FORCE_FLAT_NAMESPACE on macOS), kin-vfs intercepts standard library filesystem calls (open, read, write, stat, readdir).
• Graph-First Serving: When a tool requests a file under a Kin-managed workspace, kin-vfs redirects the request to fetch the entity source and layout directly from the local kin-daemon graph store, verifying content hashes on the fly.
• Git/Local Fallback: File reads that fall outside Kin-managed semantics or references that do not exist in the graph fall back transparently to the underlying physical filesystem.

Structure

• crates/kin-vfs: Rust crate implementing the VFS lookup, filesystem virtualization logic, cache management, and communication client to kin-daemon.
• shell/: Shell hook scripts to set up the environment variables (DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES / LD_PRELOAD) automatically when entering a Kin workspace.
• tests/: Integration and regression tests ensuring that virtual filesystem calls behave identically to native OS files under compilers (e.g. gcc, clang, rustc).

Build and Setup

To build the VFS shim library:

cargo build --release -p kin-vfs

This produces libkin_vfs_shim.so (Linux) or libkin_vfs_shim.dylib (macOS), which is copied into ~/.kin/lib by the installer.