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Date:      Fri, 29 Oct 2021 11:59:40 +0100
From:      David Chisnall <theraven@FreeBSD.org>
To:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Deprecating smbfs(5) and removing it before FreeBSD 14
Message-ID:  <157d6222-0a89-230d-8e54-ec0b785af6a3@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20211028152642.ejvwewkztewotln4@mutt-hbsd>
References:  <CAPyFy2CJKxMQQKwD3N=MTe-P4KodN77e3YCEh4z0Ssf9sXWEcQ@mail.gmail.com> <20211028152642.ejvwewkztewotln4@mutt-hbsd>

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On 28/10/2021 16:26, Shawn Webb wrote:
> I wonder if providing a 9pfs client would be
> a good step in helping deprecate smbfs.

Note: WSL2 uses 9p-over-VMBus, but most of the Linux world is moving 
away from 9p-over-VirtIO to FUSE-over-VirtIO.  This has a few big 
advantages:

  - The kernel already has solid FUSE support so this isn't a completely 
new code path.

  - FUSE is designed around POSIX filesystem semantics, 9p isn't and 
this mismatch causes problems in places.

  - FUSE filesystems can be exposed almost directly to the guest.  For 
example, if you have a networked filesystem you can run the FUSE FS in 
an unprivileged userspace process and remove the entire host kernel 
storage stack from the attack surface for the guest.

  - FUSE allows exposing buffer cache pages.  The FUSE-over-VirtIO 
mechanism makes it fairly easy to expose read-only root filesystem 
images to guests.

The last point is especially important for container workloads where you 
may have hundreds of containers in lightweight VMs on a single node all 
using the same base layer.

David




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