cloud-hypervisor/docs/fs.md

How to use virtio-fs

In the context of virtualization, it is always convenient to be able to share a directory from the host with the guest.

virtio-fs, also known as vhost-user-fs is a virtual device defined by the VIRTIO specification which allows any VMM to perform filesystem sharing.

Pre-requisites

The daemon

This virtual device relies on the vhost-user protocol, which assumes the backend (device emulation) is handled by a dedicated process running on the host. This daemon is called virtiofsd and needs to be present on the host.

Install virtiofsd

VIRTIOFSD_URL="$(curl --silent https://api.github.com/repos/cloud-hypervisor/nemu/releases/latest | grep "browser_download_url" | grep "virtiofsd-x86_64" | grep -o 'https://.*[^ "]')"
wget --quiet $VIRTIOFSD_URL -O "virtiofsd"
chmod +x "virtiofsd"
sudo setcap cap_sys_admin+epi "virtiofsd"

Create shared directory

mkdir /tmp/shared_dir

Run virtiofsd

./virtiofsd \
    -d \
    -o vhost_user_socket=/tmp/virtiofs \
    -o source=/tmp/shared_dir \
    -o cache=always

The cache=always option should be the default when using virtiofsd with the cloud-hypervisor VMM. This allows the daemon to memory map the shared files, which gives better I/O performance.

The cache=none option is another way to run the daemon but because the virtqueues are used to convey the files content in this case, the I/O performance is impacted.

The kernel

In order to leverage virtio-fs support from within the guest, and because the code has not been merged in upstream Linux kernel yet, it is required to build a custom kernel embedding the patches.

The following branch virtio-pmem_and_virtio-fs on the repository https://github.com/sboeuf/linux.git includes all the needed patches to support virtio-fs.

Make sure to build a kernel out of this branch that can be then used to boot the VM.

How to share directories with cloud-hypervisor

Start the VM

Once the daemon is running, the option --fs from cloud-hypervisor needs to be used.

Direct kernel boot option is preferred since we need to provide the custom kernel including the virtio-fs patches. We could boot from hypervisor-fw if we had previously edited the image to replace the kernel binary.

Because vhost-user expects a dedicated process (virtiofsd in this case) to be able to access the guest RAM to communicate through the virtqueues with the driver running in the guest, --memory option needs to be slightly modified. It needs to specify a backing file for the memory so that an external process can access it.

Assuming you have clear-kvm.img and custom-vmlinux.bin on your system, here is the cloud-hypervisor command you need to run:

./cloud-hypervisor \
    --cpus 4 \
    --memory "size=512,file=/dev/shm" \
    --disk path=clear-kvm.img \
    --kernel custom-vmlinux.bin \
    --cmdline "console=ttyS0 reboot=k panic=1 nomodules root=/dev/vda3" \ 
    --fs tag=virtiofs,sock=/tmp/virtiofs,num_queues=1,queue_size=512

By default, DAX is enabled with a cache window of 8GiB. You can specify a custom size (let's say 4GiB for this example) for the cache by explicitly setting DAX and the cache size:

--fs tag=virtiofs,sock=/tmp/virtiofs,num_queues=1,queue_size=512,dax=on,cache_size=4G

In case you don't want to use a shared window of cache to pass the shared files content, this means you will have to explicitly disable DAX with dax=off. Note that in this case, the cache_size parameter will be ignored.

--fs tag=virtiofs,sock=/tmp/virtiofs,num_queues=1,queue_size=512,dax=off

Mount the shared directory

The last step is to mount the shared directory inside the guest, using the virtio_fs filesystem type.

mkdir mount_dir
mount \
    -t virtio_fs virtiofs mount_dir/ \
    -o rootmode=040000,user_id=0,group_id=0,dax

The tag needs to be consistent with what has been provided through the cloud-hypervisor command line, which happens to be virtiofs in this example.

The dax option must be removed in case the shared cache region is not enabled from the VMM.