Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:
On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 5:59 AM, Avi Kivity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I was wondering if anyone had thought about creating a virtio file system,
There was some work using the plan 9 filesystem protocol over virtio. Not
sure where that stands. You could base your work off that.
There is still work ongoing, but its mostly in short bursts. Its
operational under Linux, but I have not tested under the most recent
kernel/kvm combination. I presented some initial performance studies
at KVM Forum -- the slides are available:
http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/KvmForum2008
The client code is already in kernel mainstream, there are patches for
an in-qemu-server, but they have not been merged yet -- I think you
can find them in the archives on the KVM mailing list. I'd be happy
to answer any questions on the code. There's plenty of room for
optimizations on both the client and server side, as well as more
complete support for the full Linux VFS interface.
I have started to play with the idea a little myself, but my biggest
problem is that I have no clue how to write filesystem drives in my Guest
OS, Window XP, or even if it is possible to get a Windows FileSystem driver
to talk directly to a PCI device, or if some kind of dummy block device
would be needed.
Windows is a tougher nut to crack here -- there is actually a 9P
filesystem driver for Windows (that works over TCP/IP) available from
Rangboom, but the license terms under which it was developed means
that it is closed source. I'm not sure if we could entice Rangboom to
add virtio support to their existing driver....
If someone is enterprising, then
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm is probably a good
start as an example of how to build an IFS driver for Windows.
Would probably want to implement extensions to the 9p protocol to
support this too. And mapping file system semantics between Windows and
Unix is hugely complicated. In all honesty, CIFS over virtio-net is a
better solution since Samba has already done the hard work of getting
the details right.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
-eric
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