Funding bhyve VirtFS/9p completion project

Thoughts

Via Michael Dexter on Twitter:

Make #bhyveVirtFS/9p a thing today at bsdfund.org! The first $1500 in sponsorships are MATCHED by an awesome company that is using bhyve 9pfs in PRODUCTION. They’re motivated. We’re motivated. Let’s do this!

And from BSDfund.org:

This project will complete the current bhyve VirtFS/9p work with a roadmap for feature competitiveness with QEMU/KVM and Windows WSL2.

I remember getting excited about this back in late 2016 when I saw this newsgroup message by Jakub Wojciech Klama from earlier that year. If we could have this in bhyve, I would be unreasonably happy.

For those unfamiliar, at a high level VirtFS allows you to pass through folders directly into virtual machines from a host, rather than dealing with generic NFS or Samba/CIFS. This paper by members of IBM’s Linux Technology Centre goes into great detail explaining the motivation behind the system, and its implementation. I’ll try and blog more about it.

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Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. Hi!

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