Genodians: Serving the local depot over 9P

Some people have asked about deploying their "local" packages from a Linux build machine to a Sculpt host, and I use 9P. I have put together a package of my 9P server specifically for serving depot/local using the internal Sculpt network which I will briefly explain. Using the 9P protocol is in some ways more convenient than a VirtualBox shared folder because it can be started and stopped as in independent subsystem rather than a VBox-builtin, the client is usually built into the Linux kernel, and of course, it works with modern operating systems such as 9FRONT.

9P

9FRONT

The server is available from my depot under Utilities/depot_9P and requires access to the root of the file-system hosting the depot (ahci-0.1.fs for example) and access to the nic_router. The server is jailed to /depot/local during initialization so it shouldn't be able to access any other directories. We can hope that eventually we get a graphical "change-root" component, but for now the server expects the root server as a convenience. The IP address of the server is hardcoded to 10.0.1.99 so it should be easy to remeber.

To mount the server from the Linux command line of a VirtualBox guest:

mount -t 9p 10.0.1.99 /mnt

To add the server to /etc/fstab in a way that the user can mount and unmount at will:

10.0.1.99       /n/genode       9p      noauto,user     0 0

Mounting the server from an external machine is more complicated because the 9P port must be forwarded through the nic_router.

My true reasons for writing a 9P server will be revealed in later posts...

Addendum

The source code of the server is here:

https://github.com/ehmry/ninep

The package recipe is here:

https://github.com/ehmry/genode-ehmry/tree/master/runtimes/depot_9P