This is great news Stefan, thanks for the hard work, everybody is delighted to see that you've submitted patches for Kata, and the proper documentation on how to use it!
I'm really interested in understanding the full details of this solution, and super happy that we now have a good answer to all the trouble that 9p caused us.
Looking forward to merging this in our Kata codebase soon :)
Thanks, Sebastien
On Fri, 2018-12-14 at 16:13 +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
[Resend - the original may not have been delivered.]
Dear Kata Containers Community, I'm delighted to announce the first release of virtio-fs, a new shared file system for virtual machines that is designed for container use cases, including shared volumes.
Unlike virtio-9p and NFS over AF_VSOCK, virtio-fs aims to take advantage of the co-location between the virtual machine and the hypervisor in order to achieve local file system semantics and improve performance.
For example, it can use Linux Direct Access (DAX) to access file contents directly from the host page cache. This reduces communication with the file server and avoids duplicating data into each sandbox VM. It also means that mmap MAP_SHARED on a shared volume is coherent between sandbox VMs.
The Linux kernel code (including performance numbers) has been posted here: https://marc.info/?l=linux-fsdevel&m=154446243324255&w=2
Kata Containers integration is already available so you can benchmark and test virtio-fs. The project is under active development and we still expect to make significant changes based on feedback and collaboration.
We hope virtio-fs is interesting as a next step in overcoming virtio-9p's performance and limitations. Let us know how it performs!
You can read more about virtio-fs here: https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/
The Kata HowTo is here: https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/howto-kata.html
The Kata runtime and agent changes are fairly straightforward and comparable to virtio-9p. There are several other code changes due to using a Fedora initramfs, systemd, and modular kernel. These are not essential to virtio-fs but are simply how I preferred to develop and test.
The FAQ on the virtio-fs website explains the main technical features. Please let me know if you have any questions or need help getting it running! I'm also on #kata-dev IRC if you need a hand.
Stefan _______________________________________________ kata-dev mailing list kata-dev@lists.katacontainers.io http://lists.katacontainers.io/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kata-dev