Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living. Usually I tend to pause and think, real hard, becuase the people asking me this aren’t programmers. They use computers, but are mostly limited to a Windows machine, writing in MS Word and browsing the Internet, mostly for Facebook.

I often start off with: “It’s a bit complicated to explain … “, by which time I’ve lost most of the people in the room listening to me. Sometimes I say: “I’m a software architect.”, because people seem to know what architects do for a living, they draw houses, design stuff and drive SAAB’s. Much like dentists. The prefix “software” however does confuse people.

Don’t try this at home kids. (Disclaimer: I live in Sweden :)

This is a rant about something I recently found to be a long standing battle line in the world of programming, Lau78. The event vs thread based approach to programming. As rants go I do not aspire to deliver a clear or logical message, what so ever. It’s basically just something I need to get off my chest.

It was not until 2007 I first learned about the event based approach to programming and event libraries like libevent and libev. Up until that point the silver bullet everyone was using was … Threads.

This post doesn’t cover fully setting up KVM/Qemu with virt-manager and creating virtual machine guests. See the Ubuntu KVM Installtion, VirtManager Guide, the Ubuntu Server Guide on libvirt, or HowtoForge for that.

Instead this blog post details the most relevant steps to get file system pass-through between a Linux host and Qemu guest working. The upstream Qemu docs provide a good starting point, as is the original IBM paper on VirtFS. For users of Ubuntu <= 13.04, watch out for the libvirt bug that I know many people run into, myself included.