Greetings, I have been working on adding the ability to expose local file
systems to a remote instance of qemu. I have decided that since there is
already a connection from the client to the VM with the RFB protocol that I
want to extend that. I have spent some time researching the current
approaches that VNC uses to transfer files between the client and the host and
none of them seem to offer a solution I like. The NFS approach is too
cumbersome at this point, and transferring entire files to the host before they
are accessed is also prohibitive. So I started on the following approach:
http://www.geiseri.com/sharedfolderspec/sharedfolderspec.html
This approach is a bit different in the way that the server initiates all file
access, and it accesses data from the client on demand. This is done via a
block based approach so only the desired data is read from the client's file
system. Also I tried to make the messages mesh well with the API's of
Microsoft's file system driver and the FUSE file system driver. The goal
being
that the VNC session would expose these shares as part of the local file
system. Since the implementation I am working against on qemu only supports
the vfat file systems I have mirrored most of the behavior against that. The
only casualties so far have been symbolic links, special files (sockets,
devices, etc), user ids and group ids. For 99% of the applications out there
this should not be an issue. Please someone correct me if I am mistaken
though. My main use case is to share my local USB key with my VM.
I am looking for feedback from other VNC implementors to see if they are
willing to entertain this extension. It would be nice if there was a way to
share client data with the host similar to how Microsoft does it with their
terminal services. (For those of you who have worked with the RDP protocol
this is going to look eerily familiar)
I think this might compete with some VNC server vendor's paid offerings, but it
would be nice to have a common way to do this. I hope they do not feel
threatened and consider this extension as an option.
Lastly those of you who are interested enough to provide feedback, my
technical writing skills are sketchy at best, so please ignore grammar and
spelling mistakes for now. I am open to hints on how to clarify wording
though. I am most interested in how server implementers see this fitting into
their architecture. At the bottom of the html page there is a link to the
restructured text file. Please make any edits to it and send me unified diffs
so
I can merge in any feedback.
Thanks for reading this long email.
-ian reinhart geiser
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate
GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the
lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win:
http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo
_______________________________________________
tigervnc-rfbproto mailing list
tigervnc-rfbproto@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tigervnc-rfbproto
