RE: [Xen-users] Windows under Linux: access to Linux file system

["Petersson, Mats" <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
> Natalie Kather
> Sent: 18 May 2007 14:51
> To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Xen-users] Windows under Linux: access to Linux file system
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm planning to run Windows as a guest under Gentoo Linux. However, I
> wonder if Windows then is able to access the Linux file system (e.g.
> reiser4) so that I wouldn't need a seperate fat32 partition anymore.

Well, this depends on how you look at things and what you want to do. 

First of all, Windows must (whether it's virtual or not) be able to
"understand" the filesystem that it is using. This means that unless
somone comes up with a Windows filesystem driver for Reiser, Ext3 or
whatever you want to use, Windows itself will not be able to read a
Linux-type filesystem, only FAT(32) and NTFS are normally "understood"
by Windows. 

But this may not REALLY be what you want to do anyways... 

You don't actually need to give windows it's own partition when it is
running within a virtual machine (as a guest on the "host machine") - it
can use a file as "disk". This file can be inside any filesystem that
the host can read, which means that it can be inside a reiserFS
filesystem, for example. 

The next question (which you don't ask here, but I'd like to explain
anyways) is what happens if you would like Windows to be able to see
files held in Linux. This is a slightly different matter than the
filesystem that your Windows guest uses to boot from. Theoretically, you
can have a shared filesystem, but as soon as you want one of the owners
write to it, problems occur. So the solution here is to use one system
as a file-server for the other (so, for example, let the hose be a
file-server that Windows uses). This way, there's no problems with
differences in "opinion" about what the content is and should be on the
file-system. [And of course, networked access to filesystems are
"neutral" to the actual file-system used by the OS accessing it, so a
Windows system can access files stored in a ReiserFS or Sun ZFS without
any problems at all (aside from different ideas of whether "blah.txt" is
a different or same filename as "Blah.txt")]. 

--
Mats
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Natalie
> 
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