Virtio File System.

[scott.kvm@scottrix.co.uk]

All

I am new to this mailing list, so please let me know if I am in the wrong 
place or asking questions in a way I shouldn't.

I was wondering if anyone had thought about creating a virtio file system, 
rather than using a block device and hence a single file on the host OS as 
the virtio block device already does, but map file system calls on the 
guest OS to file system calls on the host OS through the virtio interface.  
In this way the Guest OS could share files with the Host OS without needing 
to use Samba, which from my current experiences is rather slow.

I have started to play with the idea a little myself, but my biggest 
problem is that I have no clue how to write filesystem drives in my Guest 
OS, Window XP, or even if it is possible to get a Windows FileSystem driver 
to talk directly to a PCI device, or if some kind of dummy block device 
would be needed.

My host OS is Linux, Guest OS is Windows XP.  Maybe I should start with a 
Linux/Linux setup and get that working first ?

Any comments, suggests, problems that you can see with this idea would be 
great.

Thanks,

Scott.