Re: Deprecating smbfs(5) and removing it before FreeBSD 14

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 11:59:40AM +0100, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 28/10/2021 16:26, Shawn Webb wrote:
> > I wonder if providing a 9pfs client would be
> > a good step in helping deprecate smbfs.
> 
> Note: WSL2 uses 9p-over-VMBus, but most of the Linux world is moving away
> from 9p-over-VirtIO to FUSE-over-VirtIO.  This has a few big advantages:
> 
>  - The kernel already has solid FUSE support so this isn't a completely new
> code path.
> 
>  - FUSE is designed around POSIX filesystem semantics, 9p isn't and this
> mismatch causes problems in places.
> 
>  - FUSE filesystems can be exposed almost directly to the guest.  For
> example, if you have a networked filesystem you can run the FUSE FS in an
> unprivileged userspace process and remove the entire host kernel storage
> stack from the attack surface for the guest.
> 
>  - FUSE allows exposing buffer cache pages.  The FUSE-over-VirtIO mechanism
> makes it fairly easy to expose read-only root filesystem images to guests.
> 
> The last point is especially important for container workloads where you may
> have hundreds of containers in lightweight VMs on a single node all using
> the same base layer.

That's really cool. I hadn't heard about FUSE-over-VirtIO before.
Thanks for the info!

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder / Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/pubkeys/-/raw/master/Shawn_Webb/03A4CBEBB82EA5A67D9F3853FF2E67A277F8E1FA.pub.asc