[Qemu-devel] SMB server and permissions

[Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

Dear All,

Just thinking - it would be really neat to get a Linux "live-CD" working 
  with a USB stick, and SMB. Sort of like Qemu-Puppy, or 
damnsmalllinux-embedded do. BUT...

DSL/PuppyLinux both use a loopback filesystem and a disk image for 
/home. This works well, but the disk-image is hard to work with from the 
host.

It would be much much neater to use SMB, and a regular directory, since 
this allows /home to be a regular directory, accessible:
   - from the host (as a normal directory)
   - from the guest (via SMB)
   - from the pendrive, when booted directly.

BUT, the pendrive has to be formatted with VFAT, in order to be Windows 
compatible. So, at last, my question:

  "Is there any way to get QEMU's SMB server to support Unix filesystem 
semantics (permissions, case-sensitive, symlinks, owners) while the data 
is actually stored on a VFAT filesystem?"

   - I know about UMSDOS, but it's now defunct.
   - Permissions,ownerships aren't so important, but symlinks, and 
avoiding clashes between filenames with case-differences are.


Alternatively, now that Qemu has rw support for virtual FAT, could it be 
done this way? Alternatively, how about supporting an ext2 partition?



Thanks for your advice - QEMU is brilliant!

Richard