Re: [Qemu-devel] windows xp under pclinuxos 2005

[Jan Marten Simons <marten@xtal.rwth-aachen.de>]

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>> I'm still thinking FTP would be a useful alternative as it's more low-level.
>>     
>
> It is not only simpler, it is no file system.
>
> With FTP, you'd still have to "download" the files to use them. By 
> contrast, SMB and NFS allow you to use the files directly (even writing). 
> I tried to fill this gap by writing vvfat a long time ago, but people seem 
> to hate it.
>   
Actually, I think vvfat is another useful feature (thanks for the work 
you put into it), but I also think it's not trivial to keep the device 
in sync while qemu is runnning and writes can occur from the host to the 
shared directory and from the guest to the virtual hdd / removable 
medium (hotplug support is needed from the guest or things are likely to 
go out of sync). With FTP you'd just refresh when the ftp-client asks 
for a refresh. Much easier to handle this ;)
Additionally linux is able to mount FTP as well (using FUSE or LUFS) 
thou this is a bit of a hack.

In my opinion the versatility of qemu is one of its best features. 
Therefore I think its good to add various helpers to it, so you can 
choose the one, which is suited best for your setup/problem. Other 
products don't offer that flexibility.


With regards and thanks for vvfat,

Jan