Hi Mario, Feature similarly aside, one benefit of introducing the virtiofs driver (and other libvirt / qemu specific drivers) is centered on "Enterprise Parity". By this I'm referring to the substantial demands that corporations and their development teams place on comparative analysis between vendor and operating system solutions.
Requisite stages of product design, implementation, and delivery timeline planning generally occur well in advance of any code or documentation being written. Solutions analysis involving software architecture planning and scoping stages will sometimes involve "Should we use Linux or FreeBSD?" – if FreeBSD lacks the same tooling as Linux where "these things must be the same" then many orgs will simply not use FreeBSD. Personally, I find FreeBSD technically superior in nearly every single possible way compared to Linux, and having watched market share decrease over the past twenty five years makes me sad (and it means that I have to use Linux more often). I want that trend reversed, and for that to happen we need feature parity for (cloud related in particular) tooling - and that's where the virtfs driver fits in the conversation. It brings us one step closer to teams using FreeBSD instead of Linux. Ok enough of my rambling. Hope that makes sense. Thanks, Eva On Mon, Feb 9, 2026, at 22:57, Mario Marietto wrote: > `Hello Emil,` > > `Inside a FreeBSD guest OS (15.0-RELEASE) I do :` > > kldload virtio_p9fs > > kldload p9fs_load > > > `mount -t p9fs sharename /mnt/host` > > `` > > `This works for me,I can share files between FreeBSD 15.0 guest and > FreeBSD 14.3 host os. So,what's missing in this case and which features > you added ?` > > `Thanks.` > > > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 4:05 AM Emil Tsalapatis <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi everyone, >> >> I recently finished the virtiofs driver and it is now ready for review. >> The device allows for sharing directories between a FreeBSD guest and a host. >> >> The driver really is two components: >> >> 1) The virtio device that sends FUSE tickets to and from the host: D46295 >> <https://reviews.freebsd.org/D46295> >> 2) The file system that gets mounted in the guest: D46296 >> <https://reviews.freebsd.org/D46296>. >> >> To test it you need a couple additional fixes/workarounds for FUSE-related >> issues. You can grab a working tree here >> <https://github.com/etsal/freebsd-src/tree/virtiofs> or apply diffs D55047 >> <https://reviews.freebsd.org/D55047> and D55046 >> <https://reviews.freebsd.org/D55046>. D55046 is a workaround, but still >> prevents an assertion failure related to FUSE caching until the underlying >> issue is properly fixed on HEAD. >> >> To use it, make sure you are creating virtiofs device on the host then from >> the FreeBSD guest run >> >> mount -t virtiofs <tag> <mountpoint> >> >> where <tag> is the name tag you gave to the virtiofs device in the host VMM. >> >> Reviews and testing welcome! >> >> Thanks, >> Emil >> >> > > > -- > Mario.
