GVFS - Git Virtual File System, Manages massive Git repositories

GVFS stands for Git Virtual File System, It manages massive Git repositories possible. GVFS virtualizes the file system beneath your git repo so that git and all tools see what appears to be a normal repo, but GVFS only downloads objects as they are needed. GVFS also manages git's sparse-checkout to ensure that git operations like status, checkout, etc., can be as quick as possible because they will only consider the files that the user has accessed, not all files in the repo.

Git struggles to handle enterprise-scale repositories. Operations like cloning will slow to a crawl when you have millions of files in a repository, and even something as simple as getting your repository status will leave you waiting. GVFS was created by the Visual Studio Team Services team at Microsoft, specifically to deal with these scale issues for Microsoft's own codebases.