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. It 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. 9P 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. That'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. Patching 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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
