From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1O0MW7-0003BP-88 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:17:35 -0400 Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=39600 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1O0MW4-0003B7-V3 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:17:34 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1O0MW3-00053H-Ue for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:17:32 -0400 Received: from mail-fx0-f221.google.com ([209.85.220.221]:49539) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1O0MW3-000539-K6 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:17:31 -0400 Received: by fxm21 with SMTP id 21so2542703fxm.2 for ; Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:17:30 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20100409212212.GB31666@shareable.org> References: <20100409212212.GB31666@shareable.org> Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:17:30 +0200 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [GSoC 2010] Pass-through filesystem support. From: Mohammed Gamal Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Jamie Lokier Cc: Anthony Liguori , Cam Macdonell , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kvm-devel On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Jamie Lokier wrote: > 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. =A0It 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. =A09P 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. =A0That'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. =A0Patching > 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 > Hi Jamie, Thanks for your input. That's all good and well. The question now is which direction would the community prefer to go. Would everyone be just happy with virtio-9p passthrough? Would it support multiple OSs (Windows comes to mind here)? Or would we eventually need to patch Samba for passthrough filesystems? Regards, Mohammed