I’ve tried setting up the Qemu (in this case KVM as it uses the Qemu code in question) 9P/Virtfs filesystem for sharing files to a VM. Here is the Qemu documentation for it [1].
VIRTFS="-virtfs local,path=/vmstore/virtfs,security_model=mapped-xattr,id=zz,writeout=immediate,fmode=0600,dmode=0700,mount_tag=zz" VIRTFS="-virtfs local,path=/vmstore/virtfs,security_model=passthrough,id=zz,writeout=immediate,mount_tag=zz"
Above are the 2 configuration snippets I tried on the server side. The first uses mapped xattrs (which means that all files will have the same UID/GID and on the host XATTRs will be used for storing the Unix permissions) and the second uses passthrough which requires KVM to run as root and gives the same permissions on the host as on the VM. The advantages of passthrough are better performance through writing less metadata and having the same permissions in host and VM. The advantages of mapped XATTRs are running KVM/Qemu as non-root and not having a SUID file in the VM imply a SUID file in the host.
Here is the link to Bonnie++ output comparing Ext3 on a KVM block device (stored on a regular file in a BTRFS RAID-1 filesystem on 2 SSDs on the host), a NFS share from the host from the same BTRFS filesystem, and virtfs shares of the same filesystem. The only tests that Ext3 doesn’t win are some of the latency tests, latency is based on the worst-case not the average. I expected Ext3 to win most tests, but didn’t expect it to lose any latency tests.
Here is a link to Bonnie++ output comparing just NFS and Virtfs. It’s obvious that Virtfs compares poorly, giving about half the performance on many tests. Surprisingly the only tests where Virtfs compared well to NFS were the file creation tests which I expected Virtfs with mapped XATTRs to do poorly due to the extra metadata.
Here is a link to Bonnie++ output comparing only Virtfs. The options are mapped XATTRs with default msize, mapped XATTRs with 512k msize (I don’t know if this made a difference, the results are within the range of random differences), and passthrough. There’s an obvious performance benefit in passthrough for the small file tests due to the less metadata overhead, but as creating small files isn’t a bottleneck on most systems a 20% to 30% improvement in that area probably doesn’t matter much. The result from the random seeks test in passthrough is unusual, I’ll have to do more testing on that.
SE Linux
On Virtfs the XATTR used for SE Linux labels is passed through to the host. So every label used in a VM has to be valid on the host and accessible to the context of the KVM/Qemu process. That’s not really an option so you have to use the context mount option. Having the mapped XATTR mode work for SE Linux labels is a necessary feature.
Conclusion
The msize mount option in the VM doesn’t appear to do anything and it doesn’t appear in /proc/mounts, I don’t know if it’s even supported in the kernel I’m using.
The passthrough and mapped XATTR modes give near enough performance that there doesn’t seem to be a benefit of one over the other.
NFS gives significant performance benefits over Virtfs while also using less CPU time in the VM. It has the issue of files named .nfs* hanging around if the VM crashes while programs were using deleted files. It’s also more well known, ask for help with an NFS problem and you are more likely to get advice than when asking for help with a virtfs problem.
Virtfs might be a better option for accessing databases than NFS due to it’s internal operation probably being a better map to Unix filesystem semantics, but running database servers on the host is probably a better choice anyway.
Virtfs generally doesn’t seem to be worth using. I had hoped for performance that was better than NFS but the only benefit I seemed to get was avoiding the .nfs* file issue.
The best options for storage for a KVM/Qemu VM seem to be Ext3 for files that are only used on one VM and for which the size won’t change suddenly or unexpectedly (particularly the root filesystem) and NFS for everything else.