This year I presented virtio-fs at KVM Forum 2019 with David Gilbert and Miklos Szeredi. virtio-fs is a host<->guest file system that allows guests to access a shared directory on the host. We've been working on virtio-fs together with Vivek Goyal and community contributors since 2018 and are excited that it is now being merged upstream in Linux and QEMU.
virtio-fs gives guests file system access without the need for disk image files or copying files between the guest and host. You can even boot a guest from a directory on the host without a disk image file. Kata Containers 1.7 and later ship with virtio-fs support for running VM-isolated containers.
What is new and interesting about virtio-fs is that it takes advantage of the co-location of guests and the hypervisor to avoid file server communication and to provide local file system semantics. The guest can map the contents of files from the host page cache. This bypasses the guest page cache to reduce memory footprint and avoid copying data into guest RAM. Network file systems and earlier attempts at paravirtualized file systems, like virtio-9p, cannot do this since they are designed for message-passing communication only.
To learn more about virtio-fs, check out the video or slides (PDF) from the presentation.
