On 12.04.2010, at 10:15, Mohammed Gamal wrote: > On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 12:29 AM, Jamie Lokier <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote: >>> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Mohammed Gamal <m.gamal005@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Jamie Lokier <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>>> To throw a spanner in, the most widely supported filesystem across >>>>> operating systems is probably NFS, version 2 :-) >>>> >>>> Remember that Windows usage on a VM is not some rare use case, and >>>> it'd be a little bit of a pain from a user's perspective to have to >>>> install a third party NFS client for every VM they use. Having >>>> something supported on the VM out of the box is a better option IMO. >>> >>> i don't think virtio-CIFS has any more support out of the box (on any >>> system) than virtio-9P. >> >> It doesn't, but at least network-CIFS tends to work ok and is the >> method of choice for Windows VMs - when you can setup Samba on the >> host (which as previously noted you cannot always do non-disruptively >> with current Sambas). >> >> -- Jamie >> > > I think having support for both 9p and CIFS would be the best option. > In that case the user will have the option to use either one, > depending on how their guests support these filesystems. In that case > I'd prefer to work on CIFS support while the 9p effort can still go > on. I don't think both efforts are mutually exclusive. I think that the 9p support is handled by the IBM guys pretty well already. They do need help, but I doubt they need as much help as a full GSoC student. You're definitely free to help them out regardless of GSoC :-). As far as CIFS goes - we currently do use CIFS in the SUSE Studio infrastructure as data interface between host and build guests. About 80% of all backend bugs resulted from that decision. It just breaks in the most ridiculous ways. Just a few examples from our commit log: - loopback mounts on CIFS break after heavy I/O - moving symlinks fails - does not allow ':' in file names So we're currently waiting for 9p eagerly, as that at least gives us easy control over the stack. And it's a lot less complicated. Also since -net user does support samba exporting already, I don't see that much value in adding it. I'd rather like to see a virtio-9p driver for Windows. Alex -- 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
