feat: Auto-initialize the host paths of shares

[lordkekz]

Hi, thanks for this amazing project!
I wanted to share a little patch here and hear your opinion if you want to add this kind of feature. I'm looking forward to your feedback!

Motivation

• Currently microvms will fail if they have a share which doesn't yet exist on the host.
• If some permissions in the share are not accessible to the microvm:kvm user they will not be accessible for the guest, leading to somewhat surprising errors.
• I don't want to manually create the shares and ensure they have proper permissions
  • e.g. with this approach I can mount runtime secrets into a VM and have them readable without adding an additional script in my config

Proposed change

• The install-microvm-... unit creates the directories for shares on the host.
• The install-microvm-... unit recursively chowns the directories for the configured runner user.
• Both changes only apply to fully declarative VMs.

Issues / TODO

• There may be some cases where mkdir is not the desired way to create the share source directories, e.g. if one wants to mount a zfs dataset or btrfs subvolume in the location.
• There's a risk of permissions of already existing shares being lost. => We could also only initialize the permissions if the directory was newly created by install-microvm

[astro]

This is a useful improvement. Can anyone think of any host setup that could be broken by this?

[astro]

Oh wait, this PR is only for declarative VMs!

To cover all use-cases, the mkdir must be added to microvm.binScripts.virtiofsd-run in nixos-modules/microvm/virtiofsd/default.nix. I think you won't need any permissions mangling there.

[lordkekz]

Oh wait, this PR is only for declarative VMs!

Ah, sorry for only now getting around to answering. I meant to only create the directories for declarative VMs, but I'm open to also creating them for non-declarative VMs (it's probably even more useful there).

To cover all use-cases, the mkdir must be added to microvm.binScripts.virtiofsd-run in nixos-modules/microvm/virtiofsd/default.nix.

If I move the mkdirs into virtiofsd-run, they'll only run if there is at least one share using virtiofs. If someone uses only 9p shares they'd miss out. Is this acceptable or should I make it a separate script microvm.binScripts.initialize-shares and run that with its own systemd unit before the microvm-virtiofsd@... unit?

[Liassica]

Any updates on this? This is currently my only issue with this project.

[SuperSandro2000]

This should be done via systemd.tmpfiles