I have Windows 10 running on a laptop that runs VirtualBox that runs a Linux guest.
I do a lot of programming for the Linux environment and am working with sourcecode repositories sitting in an FS / directory tree shared between the Windows host and Linux guest, e.g. editing with SublimeText running under Windows, but doing compiling, testing, version control etc in a terminal connected to the Linux guest.
For various reasons I need the directories hosting the sourcecode repositories to allow full unix semantics, i.e. be able to set uid/gid for owner, permission bits, create fifos, symlinks, etc. etc.
I don't care if these features aren't meaningfully shared between Windows and Linux. I only need these things to be well-defined on the Linux-side. On the Windows-side, I just need to be able to read/write the file contents.
I want the files to be hosted on the Windows/host-side, not the Linux guest, as I don't want to have to fire up the Linux guest for the files to become visible/accessible on Windows.
How can I set such a thing up?
I've tried various things.
It seems, vboxsf offers only a small subset of unix features. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I've tried posixovl on top of a vboxsf mount, but I can't seem to be able to get it to support a simple operation like "mkdir mydir; rm -rf mydir". Such an operation would fail with "rm: cannot remove 'mydir': Directory not empty". My diagnosis of the problem with that is that it'll create a file "somedir/.pxovl" to keep somedir's permission bits and stuff like that on the lower FS. On the upper FS that file is not visible, so "rm -rf" can't get rid of the file. When "rm -rf" tries to "rmdir mydir" on the upper FS, that will trigger an attempt to do so on the lower FS which fails because the file ".pxovl" is still there. Please do correct me if there is a solution to that, but it's driving me crazy.
I've tried setting up a directory as a network share on the windows side, then mounting via mount.cifs on linux. It seems that such a mount doesn't properly offer unix features either, and in that sense has limitations similar to vboxsf, and I can't find any options that would allow for any kind of emulation or anything like that.
It has occurred to me that maybe there might be programs that can be set up on the Windows host side that offer real unix semantics and do some kind of emulation of unix features like an NFS server or other kind of server for network shared filesystems, but I can't seem to find any.
It has also occurred to me that overlay filesystems might be a useful tool to bring such a solution about but can't really conceptualize what such a solution might look like.
Any ideas?