OpenSolaris™ Bible

Chapter 7. Disks, Local File Systems, and the Volume Manager

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Disks

• File system management

• devfs

• UFS

• Swap space

• Other local file systems

• The Solaris Volume Manager

OpenSolaris includes support for a variety of storage devices and local file systems, as well as a traditional volume manager. This chapter describes these capabilities, with the exception of ZFS, which is described in the next chapter. Network file system support is described in Chapter 10.

Although data is usually stored on disk, it is generally accessed through a file system, hiding device-specific details. OpenSolaris provides file system support through a pluggable framework so that a variety of file systems can be used concurrently and applications are unaware of the type of underlying file system on which their data actually resides. Applications simply access files and directories through the standard POSIX APIs, while the kernel transparently manages the low-level access using the file system–specific code. New file systems can be introduced at any time without affecting existing application code.

This chapter describes the general disk storage support provided in OpenSolaris and focuses on the local file systems that applications use to store data. However, because of the flexible nature of the file system interface in UNIX, and the way that UNIX has traditionally exposed services such as networking through the file system API, OpenSolaris also provides access to a variety of other services as if they were ...