Re: [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a singleproject

From: Pekka Enberg
Date: Mon Mar 22 2010 - 08:44:48 EST


Hi Daniel,

(I'm getting slightly off-topic, sorry about that.)

Daniel P. Berrange kirjoitti:
Here it is, repeated for the Nth time:

Allow a guest to (optionally) integrate its VFS namespace with the host side
as well. An example scheme would be:

/guests/Fedora-G1/
/guests/Fedora-G1/proc/
/guests/Fedora-G1/usr/
/guests/Fedora-G1/.../
/guests/OpenSuse-G2/
/guests/OpenSuse-G2/proc/
/guests/OpenSuse-G2/usr/
/guests/OpenSuse-G2/.../

( This feature would be configurable and would be default-off, to maintain
the current status quo. )
Heh, funny. That would also solve my number one gripe with
virtualization these days: how to get files in and out of guests
without having to install extra packages on the guest side and
fiddling with mount points on every single guest image I want to play
with.

FYI, for offline guests, you can use libguestfs[1] to access & change files
inside the guest, and read-only access to running guests files. It provides
access via a interactive shell, APIs in all major languages, and also has a
FUSE mdule to expose it directly in the host VFS. It could probably be made
to work read-write for running guests too if its agent were installed inside
the guest & leverage the new Virtio-Serial channel for comms (avoiding any
network setup requirements).

Right. Thanks for the pointer.

The use case I am thinking of is working on an userspace project and wanting to test a piece of code on multiple distributions before pushing it out. That pretty much means being able to pull from the host git repository (or push to the guest repo) while the guest is running, maybe changing the code a bit and then getting the changes back to the host for the final push.

What I do now is I push the changes on the host side to a (private) remote branch and do the work through that. But that's pretty lame workaround in my opinion.

Pekka
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