Bug#1027174: linux-image-*-cloud-amd64: please add support for the 9p filesystem

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Package: linux-image-6.0.0-6-cloud-amd64
Version: 6.0.12-1
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: josch@debian.org

Hi,

I already talked with Bastian on #debian-devel about this, but that was
inconclusive, so I'm taking it to email.

I request adding support for the 9p filesystem to the cloud image. While
Bastian pointed out that the primary use case of cloud kernels is AWS,
Azure and GCE, I think that these kernels should be generally useful in
virtualisation environments such as kvm. As far as I understand it, they
significantly reduce the size by removing hardware drivers that are not
usually available in virtualised environments.

While none of the mentioned cloud providers provide 9p filesystems to
their guests, the -virtfs option to kvm/qemu is by far the simplest way
to share a host filesystem with a virtual machine. The cloud kernel
image already covers virtiofs, but virtiofsd comes with significant
additional complexity on the host - most significant is the requirement
for being run as root. Given the similarity of virtiofs and 9p, the
latter should be included as well.

Adding 9p would increase the Installed-Size by about 600kb, i.e. less
than 0.5%.

Of course, one can always install the non-cloud kernel to use 9p.

Helmut