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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
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