Feature Request - Virtiofs support to passthrough local filesystem about windows

[kroese]

Yes, it should be possible. As soon as I have some spare time I will add this feature.

[benwilks]

@raddacle "Update: 1/13/2024 - VirtioFS under Windows is now stable as of Unraid 6.12.5 (QEMU 7.2) and the test VirtioFS drivers recently released. More info here. Stable Virtio drivers with this fix should be released in the coming weeks."

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/129352-virtiofs-support-page/page/5/#comment-1301832

[kroese]

I forgot to mention, you can already pass-through disk devices like this:

environment:
  DEVICE2: "/dev/sdb"
devices:
  - /dev/sdb

But that means the whole disk will be exclusively linked to the Windows VM, and not be accesible from the host during that time. I guess you were looking for 'folder passthrough' where you dont pass the entire device, but only a single folder. And that feature is not added yet.

[raddacle]

Yes, it should be possible. As soon as I have some spare time I will add this feature.

I thought virtualizing disks with VirtioFS is currently unstable and heavily taxes the system. Have they fixed it?

[kroese]

In the latest version (v2.00) I now added a shared network folder which allows for easy filesharing with the host systems /storage folder.

[kroese]

From what I can gather even with stable VirtioFS drivers, the performance of the drive in Windows will still be a lot lower compared to using a simple Samba SMB share, which provides almost double the transfer speeds and can also be mapped to a local drive letter.

So since I now added file sharing via \\host.lan\Data I guess this issue can be closed as resolved.