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

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.

David