Sharing directories between a running VM and the host OS

In the previous recipe, we saw two examples on how to attach disks to a running KVM instance. In this recipe, we are going to share a directory from the host OS and make it available in the virtual machine. We can only perform this action on a stopped instance however. If you've been following along, you should already have a libvirt KVM instance that you can use.

Getting ready

The prerequisites for this recipe are as follows:

• Stopped libvirt KVM instance with console access
• A guest OS with the 9p and virtio kernel modules (available on most Linux distributions by default)

How to do it...

To share a directory from the host OS to the KVM guest, execute the following:

1. Create a new directory on the host OS and add a file to it:

root@kvm:~# mkdir /tmp/shared
root@kvm:~# touch /tmp/shared/file
root@kvm:~#

2. Add the following definition to the stopped KVM instance:

root@kvm:~# virsh edit kvm1
 ...
 <devices>
   ...
   <filesystem type='mount...