Comment by burnt-resistor

I really wished™ there was an API/ABI for userland- and kernelland-defined individual virtual files at arbitrary locations, backed by processes and kernel modules respectively. I've tried pipes, overlays, and FUSE to no avail. It would greatly simply configuration management implementations while maintaining compatibility with the convention of plain text files, and there's often no need to have an actual file on any media or the expense of IOPS.

While I don't particularly like the IO overhead and churn consequences of real files for performance metrics, I get the 9p-like appeal of treating the virtual fs as a DBMS/API/ABI.