Fwd: Installing virtiofs drivers on Windows 11....

[Andrea Bolognani]

Please don't top post on technical lists.

On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 10:31:47AM +0100, Mario Marietto wrote:
> > > I'm confused. Anyway,since I don't know how it works virtiofs,I'm using
> > > virtio-9p every day. So I can say that bhyve already supports virtio-9p.
> > > This is how I make it work under Linux :
> > >
> > > -s 8,virtio-9p,sharename=<host-dir-path>
> > >
> > > In the guest I need something like :
> > >
> > > mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,rw sharename /mnt
> > >
> > > I assume that what's missing on Windows 10 is only the ability to mount
> > > the shared folder.

Correct. FreeBSD as a host supports virtio-9p, but Windows as a guest
doesn't have the necessary drivers as far as I can tell.

> > > Since mount is a linux command and windows 10 / 11
> > > supports linux with it's proper kernel,a good idea could be to try to mount
> > > the shared resource within the WSL2  :)

>From what I understand, 9p is used by Windows to make its files
available to Linux in WSL2. In that scenario, Windows acts as the
server; what you would need is for Windows to be a 9p client.

I don't think there's a way you can simply forward the 9p server
created by bhyve to WSL2, but even if you could do that you'd only be
able to access the host's file from within WSL2, which is probably
not what you were looking for.

> > ok I can't because bhyve does not support nested virtualization. sorry for
> > the mistake.

Right, this makes the above idea even less feasible.

> It seems that it can work on Windows guest. Did you miss this thread ?
>
> https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/issues/126

I've skimmed the thread, and I've seen no indication in it that a
virtio-9p driver for Windows has been produced.

Once again, virtio-9p and virtiofs are two completely different
things, and the fact that a Windows driver for the latter exists
doesn't mean that the former will work. You'd need a separate driver,
and to the best of my knowledge one doesn't currently exist.

Yes, the fact that virtio-9p is sometimes also referred to as
"VirtFS" is extremely confusing :(

All reports of success in that thread seem to come from people who
are using virtiofs, not virtio-9p. You could certainly do the same if
you were using QEMU, but bhyve doesn't have virtiofs support yet.

-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization