[Virtio-fs] How is the daemon meant to be started?

[Aa Aa]

Hi

I have a few questions about using virtiofsd. I currently have multiple vms share the same mountpoint for their rootfs using 9p, in read only (9p had a permissions issue but that was overcome). I can start qemu for each of them as non root with say only allowing access to /dev/kvm and even have some of the VM running with a different user name.

If I wish to change to using virtiofsd, I can just change the init to:
  mount -t virtiofs -onoatime,nodiratime,noauto,ro rootfs /new  | mount -t 9p -onoatime,nodiratime,noauto,ro,trans=virtio,cache=loose root /new
and the qemu command line from using 9p to using a vhost-user-fs-pci device.

The problem is how do I start virtiofsd. The daemon needs root permissions from what I can tell, to start. Thereafter, it listens on the socket and only accepts a single connection on the socket. In my case, I have a single mount point that I wish to use multiple times. You cannot listen on the socket multiple times, so I cannot say that /mnt/root socket will be exported as /run/virtiofsd/mounts/mnt-root.socket by something that has been started by root independently of qemu, but rather it would appear that I need to be root and create a socket for each qemu task then drop permissions. Is this correct or is there another way to achieve this.

Cheers

JT