[Qemu-devel] Re: Access to the host filesystem

[John Davidorff Pell]

I vote for option 3, as it is the simplest and would work almost 
universally. the M$ OSes would need the add-on, but that's the price 
you pay for running windoze. Option 1 will only work if networking is 
running properly in the guest *and* in the host, so it is concievable 
that it won't work at all at times, and option 3 also has some 
guest-networking-related issues. option 2 requires guest os drivers, 
which might be hard to get.

Perhaps a combination of option 2 and 3. A special custom network card 
that does only NFS (i'm thinking not even TCP/IP, but that might be 
more work than its worth, and require drivers again...). Maybe just an 
extra IDE controler (no extra drivers) and the host drives (or 
host-based "shares") show up as drives/partitions?

JP

Fabrice Wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wonder what would be the best way to access to the host filesystem,
> especially with the Linux, MSDOS/FreeDos and Windows guest OSes.
>
> Here are my thoughts:
>
> 1) Do nothing and just use the network with NFS or Samba host servers.
> It is the easiest solution but it requires a complicated host and guest
> configuration.
>
> 2) Add a hardware device in QEMU giving access to the host filesystem
> with specific commands such as "open", "read" and "close" working by
> using DMA in physical guest memory. Then by reusing the user mode Linux
> "hostfs" filesystem, it would be easy to add access to the host
> filesystem. By reusing the dosemu "MFS" driver, it would also be
> possible to do the same as dosemu to access to an host DOS tree.
>
> 3) Add a tiny NFS server in QEMU so that no host configuration is
> needed. Then only NFS drivers are needed in the guest OS.
>
> Any comments ?
>
> Fabrice.

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