How share folder in QEMU with plan9/virtfs between MacOS host and Linux guest?

Solution 1:

As of July 2021, Plan 9 and virtfs are not available in QEMU on macOS.

An alternate method to share folders with read-write access from a macOS host to a Linux VM is to use sshfs.

Read-write access using SSHFS

1. Install sshfs on Linux VM.
2. Allow remote login on macOS host: System Preferences > Sharing > Remote login.
3. Mount macOS directory on Linux VM via:

sshfs user@macos_ip:/Users/user/mydir ~/host_mydir

If you cannot use ssh to access the macOS host you can still share the directory with read-only access using QEMU virtual FAT disk images:

Read-only access using a virtual FAT disk image

1. Add directory as a disk image via:

Note: VM will not start without fat:rw:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -machine type=q35,accel=hvf \
  -cpu host \
  -hda /images/linux.qcow2 \
  -drive file=fat:rw:/Users/user/mydir,format=raw,media=disk

2. Mount directory in Linux VM via:

Note: directory will not mount without -o ro

# 'ro' is required to mount directory
sudo mount -t auto -o ro /dev/sdb1 /media

This method has some limitations:

• [never] use non-ASCII filenames
• [never] use “-snapshot” together with “:rw:”
• [never] expect it to work when loadvm’ing
• [never] write to the FAT directory on the host system while accessing it with the guest system