User Space API
The API is in the user space when the filesystem does not directly use kernel facilities but accesses disks using high-level operating system functions and provides functions in a library that a series of utilities use to access the filesystem.
This is useful for handling disk images.
The advantage is that a filesystem can be made portable between operating systems as the high-level operating system functions it uses can be as common as ANSI C, but the disadvantage is that the API is unique to each application that implements one.
Examples of this scheme are the hfsutils and the adflib.
Read more about this topic: File System API
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