native libgfapi glusterfs support for virtio 9p filesystem passthrough

[Hans]

I can add block devices on glusterfs natively to my virtual machines since qemu 1.3
I would like to see the same feature for virtio 9p filesystems added on my VM.

Accessing a filesystem mounted on the Metal is my favorite solution for storage that is to be shared between more than one VM. But because my VMs are not running as root, they are not able to passthrough userids and gids to gluster-fuse. uid mapping is also not possible because no xattr support.

So all I can do is either setting up seperate NFS Servers to bring the Filesystem in via Network, or to start qemu as root or to add fuse_xattr on top of glusterfs_fuse. I do expect however that the fastest and most relieable solution is to make something like this possible:

-fsdev local,id=test_dev,path=gluster://this.node/test_mount,security_model=passthrough -device virtio-9p-pci,fsdev=test_dev,mount_tag=test_mount

regards

    Hans

[Christian Schoenebeck (schoenebeck)]

There are currently no plans to implement a GlusterFS fs driver backend for 9pfs in QEMU.

Right now the status of 9p in QEMU is "odd fixes", which means there are currently no paid developers maintaining 9p, nor do current 9p maintainers have sufficient time to work on it on a daily basis. New 9p features for that reason are only likely to appear if there is an effort for the feature coming from outside.

As xattrs are apparently not available with GlusterFS yet, you might want to try security_model=mapped-file with 9p as workaround instead:
https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Ok, then let's mark this ticket as WONTFIX since nobody will be working on it in the near future.