Re: [Qemu-devel] Mount image file feature

[Programmingkid]

On Aug 29, 2015, at 11:40 AM, Max Reitz wrote:

> On 27.08.2015 03:05, G 3 wrote:
>> I want to share files between my host and guest computer. A feature I
>> want to add would be a new menu item in the Machine menu called "Mount
>> Image File...". When the user selects it, a file open dialog box
>> displays. The user can then select the image file with the file he wants
>> to use. After pushing the OK button, the image file would be mounted
>> like a USB flash drive. This menu item would only show up if there is
>> usb support in the guest machine.
>> 
>> Would you be open to accepting such a feature?
> 
> Generally I'd expect this to be functionality exposed by the management
> layer. For instance using virt-manager, this can be achived as follows:
> Switch to "Details", then click "Add Hardware", choose "Storage" and
> "USB" as the "Bus type". Choose the image, click "Finish", done.

Isn't Libvirt only available on Linux? This mount image file feature would
only be on Mac OS X. Mac OS X users don't have all the fancy GUI wrappers
for QEMU :( 

Mac OS X is a second-class citizen in the QEMU world...

> The main problem I see with adding this functionality to qemu itself
> would be having to get even further into the GUI business, which hasn't
> worked out too well so far…

That is because of several reasons. One being maintainers not wanting to
advance the GUI because they feel another program should be QEMU's 
GUI. I'm sure there are plenty of good ideas that would advance QEMU's
GUI. These ideas just need to be accepted into QEMU rather than put off.

> If we didn't care about that, than we'd have to think about the
> implementation. Internally, we'd probably call QMP's blockdev-add to
> open the image file, and then QMP's device_add to add the USB device. So
> then qemu would use its own management interfaces to execute the
> operation, which seems a bit strange to me, further hinting at the fact
> that we probably should leave this to the management layer.

What works does, and it isn't always as nice looking
as we want it. I am sure we will use some kind of API to implement this 
feature. 

I just wish there were an easy way to share files between the host and the 
guest.