🔌 mountin

mountin mounts disk images in an appropriate guest operating system, using its kernel and filesystem drivers, then exposes it over 9p. So you get read/write access to obscure filesystems using a well tested driver (in theory).

In future, it'll support archive formats and obscure data files too.

✅ STATUS

⚠️ unstable / pre-alpha / experimental ⚠️

🛑 STOP! 🛑

MAKE BACKUPS OF YOUR DISK IMAGES BEFORE USING THIS TOOL

Currently, there's:

• guests for Linux 2.6, Linux 6.12, NetBSD 10.0, Dragonfly BSD, PureDarwin, AROS, Haiku and Illumos. Architecture coverage varies depending on build host.
• 9P2000.U support via a 9p server a 9pfuse client.
• A huge collection of test data fixtures, with many custom mkfs and archive and compression tools.
• A Python-based, podman-isolated build system that runs rootless and dodges dependency hell.
• A Rust library to detect and extract filesystems from many image formats.
• Full archival backup sources, outputs and containers used to build everything, saved on archive.org for future historians.

Building

Install:

• podman, make, python3 (+ venv + pip) to build.
• fuse to mount images with the 9p client.
• xz if you want to archive the lot.

Everything else is installed in containers, use the mountin module or script to build stuff. It might take a while.

# install
make dev
source .venv/bin/activate

# list targets
mountin-build outputs

# pick one and build it
mountin-build build bin/qemu/x86_64-linux/6.12/boot/rootfs.img

# inspect or explicitly request cross-platform outputs
mountin-build outputs --output-arch i386
mountin-build outputs --output-platform x86_64-windows-gnu
mountin-build outputs --all-platforms

# record the catalogue artefacts currently present
mountin-build inventory

make help   # for a full list of targets.
# make      # build everything for this arch
# make all  # to build everything possible. might take a while.

Guest and transport selection, detection engine and launch layer are still under construction, see the todo list. There's ./scripts for data recovery though.

Catalogue and format encyclopedia can be found is in the src/mountin/ tree - there's no html builder yet.

Format support

Guest operating systems are the smallest builds I could get running while preserving broad support. Every entry below has been tested end to end; (ro) means read-only. Absence of evidence, YMMV, expect occasional regressions etc.

Guest	Tables / layouts	Filesystems
Linux 6.12	MBR/DOS, GPT, BSD disklabel, Apple APM, Amiga RDB, Atari AHDI, Sun SPARC VTOC8, SGI DVH, LDM, Minix, UBI, Acorn, AIX, Ultrix, SYSV68, Rio Karma, OSF/1, HP-UX LIF, QNX4 PT, Plan 9, NetWare, Hybrid MBR, Protective MBR, OpenBSD, DragonFly, CP/M-86	ext2/3/4, FAT12/16/32, exFAT, NTFS (ntfs3), ISO9660, UDF, HFS/HFS+, XFS, JFS, Btrfs, F2FS, bcachefs, EROFS, ReiserFS, Amiga OFS/FFS, Minix, V7, SysV, SquashFS, CramFS, RomFS, EFS, BeFS, HPFS, QNX4/6, ADFS, VxFS, OMFS, NILFS2, GFS2, BFS, JFFS2, UBIFS, High Sierra
Linux 2.6	MBR/DOS, GPT, BSD disklabel, Apple APM, Amiga RDB, Atari AHDI, Sun SPARC VTOC8, SGI DVH, Minix, UBI, Acorn, AIX, Ultrix, SYSV68, OSF/1, HP-UX LIF, QNX4 PT, Plan 9, NetWare, Hybrid MBR, Protective MBR, OpenBSD, CP/M-86	ext2/3/4, FAT12/16/32, ISO9660, UDF, HFS/HFS+, XFS, JFS, Btrfs, ReiserFS, Amiga OFS/FFS, Minix, V7, SquashFS, CramFS, RomFS, EFS, BeFS, HPFS, QNX4, ADFS, VxFS, OMFS, NILFS2, GFS2, OCFS2, BFS, JFFS2, High Sierra
NetBSD 10	MBR/DOS, GPT, BSD disklabel, Apple APM, Amiga RDB, Atari AHDI, Hybrid MBR, Protective MBR	ext2/3 (ext3 via ext2), FAT12/16/32, ISO9660, UDF, HFS+, UFS/FFS, LFS, V7, EFS, Filecore
DragonFly 6.4	MBR/DOS, GPT, BSD disklabel, Hybrid MBR, Protective MBR	ext2/3 (ext3 via ext2), FAT12/16/32, ISO9660, UDF (ro), UFS1, HAMMER/HAMMER2
AROS i386	MBR/DOS, GPT, Amiga RDB, Protective MBR	FAT12/16/32, ISO9660, Amiga OFS/FFS, SFS, PFS
Haiku x86_64	MBR/DOS, GPT, Hybrid MBR, Protective MBR	ext2/3/4, FAT12/16/32, exFAT (ro), NTFS, ISO9660, UDF (ro), Btrfs (ro), ReiserFS (ro), BeFS
PureDarwin 17.4	MBR/DOS, GPT, Apple APM, Protective MBR	HFS/HFS+/HFSX
9front	MBR/DOS, Plan 9	FAT12/16/32, ISO9660 (no Rock Ridge symlinks), PAQFS (ro), FlashFS, HJFS, GEFS, CWFS, V5/V6 (ro), UNIX/32V (ro), V10 (ro)
illumos x86_64	MBR/DOS, GPT, Solaris x86 VTOC16 (inside MBR)	FAT12/16/32, ISO9660, UFS1

💩 Known bad

• Linux 6.12: UFS/FFS support is limited.
• Linux 2.6: NTFS (ntfs), UFS/FFS, and SysV; SysV symlinks can crash the guest.
• NetBSD 10: NTFS (ntfs) and Amiga OFS/FFS (adosfs).
• DragonFly 6.4: NTFS directory reads can panic the guest.