[Qemu-devel] Access to the host filesystem

[Fabrice Bellard]

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.