Re: [Qemu-devel] Win98: how to exchange data with Linux

["John R. Hogerhuis" <jhoger@pobox.com>]

On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 10:22, Filip Navara wrote:
> Adrian Smarzewski wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> > It's a windows nt driver for ext2 partitions. maybe we could
> > change it so instead of writting files on real drive it will
> > pass commands to qemu? file system is not so important, but
> > this driver is lgpl'ed.
> 
> At first guys, you confuse file system drivers and storage drivers. The 
> file system drivers have de facto no knowledge on which disk are the 
> data located, (on Windows) they recieve an object and send Read/Write 
> requests to it (well, basicly, in reality there's also the cache manager 
> between them). At second, the idea can't work, even if you would have a 
> storage driver that uses some backdoor I/O port to access host disk, the 
> host OS can't access the same partition at the same time due to things 
> like caching (on both sides (guest/host)).
> 

Yes, it is a non-workable idea to try to share a filesystem between two
running OSes.

On a slightly different tack, if your guest OS image was no longer
bootable for some reason it would be nice to be able to mount the file
system within that image for the purpose of data recovery.

Is there a way to do that?

-- John.