[vbox-dev] is virtstor being implemented?

[Alexey Eromenko]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Huihong Luo <huisinro at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I know the virtio for network is implemented in vbox, are there any plans implementing that for storage?
>
> If not, I can contribute to this, as we are very familiar with virtua disk stuff, as we do in our VBoot technology, which boots a real pc using a virtual disk, and it's close to native performance.
>
> What I am thinking is to use a virtual PCI device, and provide guest drivers. The PCI needs to be very performing in passing disk blocks.
>
> Not sure if current shared folder implementation is good enough, if so, we can easily pass the read/write using the current shared folder service to read/write the virtual disk file.
>
> - Huihong
>

1. So far there is no clear evidence that VirtIO-blk is any faster
than emulated SCSI controller.
The reason to implement it is speed ?

2. Windows-guest drivers exist (binary+source code)
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/

So regarding drivers, the maximum effort needed is to WHQL them (along
with other VBox drivers).

3. Current Shared Folders is a FileSystem.
Making a block device out of it may not work, because how will it
sync, if the host updated files ? (guest assumes that a block-device
is a wholly-owned disk)
How can it work?

4. [non-related] We would _really_ like to see you contribute
drag-n-drop code, so this can be tested and released with the next
major version of VirtualBox.

--
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"