Share a Folder Between KVM Host and Guest

I often find myself in situations where I need to share information or files between a KVM host and KVM guest. With libvirt version 0.8.5 and newer there is support for mounting a shared folder between a host and guest. I decided to try this out on my Fedora 17 host, with a Fedora 17 guest.

Using the libvirt <filesystem> xml tag I created the following xml that defines a filesystem device.
\

<filesystem type='mount' accessmode='mapped'>
    <source dir='/tmp/shared'/>
    <target dir='tag'/>
</filesystem>

Note that target dir is not necessarily a mount point, but rather a string that is exported to the guest that we will use when mounting in the guest.

In order to get this xml into the guest I had to use virsh edit F17 where F17 is the domain name of my guest. This opens the guest xml in the VI text editor. I then inserted the xml at the end of the <devices> section of the guest xml, closed VI, and started the guest.

Once the guest had booted I used the following command to mount the shared folder in the guest.
\

[root@F17 ~]# mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L tag /mnt/shared/

And voila! I can now access the /tmp/ directory of the host inside of the guest.

Note: I had some SELinux denials as a result of doing this. If I was using this as a long term solution I would clean them up, but for now I just disabled SELinux temporarily by using sudo setenforce 0 in the host.

Resources:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/9p_virtio
http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup
http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsFilesystems\