Re: [Qemu-devel] Patch: virtual vfat support

[Magnus Damm <magnus.damm@gmail.com>]

Hello,

On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 20:44:26 +0100 (CET), Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> If you have an OS advanced enough to support USB (Windows NT isn't, for
> example...), you'd expect it to support SMB out of the box, right?

Yes, true, but I would like to see a solution where filesystems could
be exported from the host to the guest without adding extra
dependencies on the host system. To make QMEU as self-contained as
possible.

> Besides, I don't think that it's as easy to support USB as it was writing
> the vvfat driver.

I think the hardest part would be to emulate the USB controller chip
attached to the PCI bus. Emulating simple USB devices on top of that
is probably not very complicated.

And I think read-only wfat is doable but I am not sure if operating
systems would work with a read-write implementation where the host
adds data to the wfat filesystem - I mean, how do we notify the guest
operating system that directories or files have changed?

Another approach instead of USB storage + wfat could be to emulate an
ISO 9660 filesystem together with a virtual cdrom drive and let a
virtual eject+insert operation be a "refresh" operation...

Thanks,

/ magnus