How do you talk to a virtual machine from the host? How does the virtual machine talk to the host? In one sense the answer is obvious: virtual machines should be thought of just like regular machines so you use the network. However the connection between host and guest is a bit more special. Suppose you want to pass a host directory up to the guest? You could use NFS, but that’s sucky to set up and you’ll have to fiddle around with firewalls and ports. Suppose you run a guest agent reporting stats back to the hypervisor. How do they talk? Network, sure, but again that requires an extra network interface and the guest has to explicitly set up firewall rules.

A few years ago my colleague Stefan Hajnoczi ported VMware’s vsock to qemu. It’s a pure guest⟷host (and guest⟷guest) sockets API. It doesn’t use regular networks so no firewall issues or guest network configuration to worry about.

You can run NFS over vsock [PDF] if you want.

And now you can of course run NBD over vsock. nbdkit supports it, and libnbd is (currently the only!) client.