From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1O0Leg-0008D4-5z for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:22:22 -0400 Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=53544 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1O0Lee-0008By-F2 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:22:21 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1O0Lec-000777-K3 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:22:20 -0400 Received: from mail2.shareable.org ([80.68.89.115]:48622) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1O0Lec-00076x-4A for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:22:18 -0400 Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2010 22:22:12 +0100 From: Jamie Lokier Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [GSoC 2010] Pass-through filesystem support. Message-ID: <20100409212212.GB31666@shareable.org> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Mohammed Gamal Cc: Anthony Liguori , Cam Macdonell , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kvm-devel Mohammed Gamal wrote: > 2- With respect to CIFS. I wonder how the shares are supposed to be > exposed to the guest. Should the Samba server be modified to be able > to use unix domain sockets instead of TCP ports and then QEMU > communicating on these sockets. With that approach, how should the > guest be able to see the exposed share? And what is the problem of > using Samba with TCP ports? One problem with TCP ports is it only works when the guest's network is up :) You can't boot from that. It also makes things fragile or difficult if the guest work you are doing involves fiddling with the network settings. Doing it over virtio-serial would have many benefits. On the other hand, Samba+TCP+CIFS does have the advantage of working with virtually all guest OSes, including Linux / BSDs / Windows / MacOSX / Solaris etc. 9P only works with Linux as far as I know. I big problem with Samba at the moment is it's not possible to instantiate multiple instances of Samba any more, and not as a non-root user. That's because it contains some hard-coded paths to directories of run-time state, at least on Debian/Ubuntu hosts where I have tried and failed to use qemu's smb option, and there is no config file option to disable that or even change all the paths. Patching Samba to make per-user instantiations possible again would go a long way to making it useful for filesystem passthrough. Patching it so you can turn off all the fancy features and have it _just_ serve a filesystem with the most basic necessary authentication would be even better. -- Jamie