[Qemu-devel] virtio block device and sysfs

[Marc Haber <mh+qemu-devel@zugschlus.de>]

Hi,

I am looking to get in touch with somebody who knows more about the
connection between host configuration, qemu, kvm, and the virtio block
device driver guest side than I know.

My goal is to have a possibility to give a "speaking" name to any
block device handed into a guest instance by the host. That name
should be visible inside the guest, just as a LV is visible with its
name in the system running the LVM.

For example I would like to say on the qemu or kvm command line
'-drive file=some-file,label=some-label,if=virtio', and have the
string "some-label" show up somewhere in /sys/block in the guest, much
as /sys/block/sda/device/model shows the hardware vendor and type for
a standard SATA disk. The guest could then handle the information
passed into it by the host with udev rules, allowing fstab constructs
like "mount /dev/virtio/block/by-label/some-label as /usr"

Since I don't have pretty much clue about kernel programming, I guess
that one would need to have qemu/kvm support for the additional label
to be passed to the emulated/virtualized guest, and a modification to
the guest kernel virtio driver which needs to accept the information
passed by the host and to generate the appropriate entry in /sys.

Am I correct in my assumption? Can you say who I need to talk to to
get advice about how to implement this (or to have it implemented, if
it's easy enough)?

Any hints will be appreciated.

Greetings
Marc

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