Got a host directory? Wish it were seamlessly mounted in your VM? Want to avoid NFS? 9p!

I wrote earlier about my life-long affair with NFS. 25 years of my life have gone into rpc portmappers and nis etc. But, so many letters in NFS, is there a better way? Enter 9p.

This post has a pretty good description. But, in a nutshell, 9p will use virtio transport, so no IP, no NFS, no lockers. Just seamless directory in both spots.

9p is from one of the last-great-hurrah’s of Bell Labs Unix era, plan-9.

But, tl;dr:

mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L /hostpath /guestpath

and boom.

ps, I know a lot of you are secret bunny lovers (not in that way!), so I included a picture of Glenda,the Plan-9 bunny.