RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1121781 +++

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1121780 +++

Description of problem:

Export host file systems to KVM guests using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), by using the usb-mtp device in QEMU.

The virtfs project, led by IBM, was never included in RHEL/KVM. It cannot be used as a general passthrough file system due to lack of Windows guest support. There was also some other concerns listed in BZ 729054, including the move MTP as an alternative.

The implementation in QEMU is not complete and there is a better replacement, virtio-fs, which is already implemented in libvirt as well.

virtio-fs is not a great alternative for a number of reasons

  - it lacks platform portability, most especially to Windows. 
  - it only works with the systemd libvirtd as it can't run unprivileged yet
  - in the guest it also requires privileged, ,manual admin setup.

Essentally virtio-fs is fine for Linux server workloads. 

USB MTP is better for cross OS portable, desktop virt file sharing from the host which is arguably more important for virt-manaager.