On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Jamie Lokier <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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. 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 > 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 -- 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
