Changes and Improvements to Removable Media Management

This device management enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

Starting with this release, better services and methods that provide removable media management have replaced previous features for managing removable media.

The following new features are available:

• New removable media services are enabled and disabled by using SMF.

  online 12:17:54 svc:/system/hal:default online 12:17:56 svc:/system/filesystem/rmvolmgr:default online 12:17:26 svc:/system/dbus:default

• Removable media is now mounted automatically in the /media directory. However, symbolic links to /media are provided from previous media mount points, /cdrom and /rmdisk, for compatibility purposes.

  For example, a compact flash memory card (/dev/dsk/c4d0p0:1) is mounted as follows:

  $ ls /media/NIKON

  For example, a USB memory stick (/dev/dsk/c3t0d0s0) is mounted as follows:

  $ ls /media/U3

  For example, a diskette (/dev/diskette0) is mounted as follows:

  $ ls /media/floppy

• The default removable media volume manager, rmvolmgr, is responsible for following activities:

  • Mounting and unmounting volumes.

  • The root instance of rmvolmgr starts at system boot. However, you can configure your session's configuration files to start an instance of rmvolmgr when you log in. When run within a user session, rmvolmgr only mounts devices owned by the current user or session and does not conflict with the root instance.

  • When rmvolmgr exits, it unmounts all media that it mounted.

  • For compatibility purposes, rmvolmgr creates symbolic links under the /cdrom, /floppy, /rmdisk directories to the actual mount points under /media.

  • A special rmvolmgr run mode is available for CDE compatibility.

• The hardware abstraction layer (HAL) daemon, hald, provides a view of the device attached to a system. This view is updated automatically as hardware configuration changes, by hot-plugging or other mechanisms.

  HAL represents a piece of hardware as a device object. A device object is identified by a unique device identifier (UDI) and carries a set of key-value pairs referred to as device properties. Some properties are derived from the actual hardware, some are merged from device information files (.fdi files) and some are related to the actual device configuration.

The following features are removed:

• The vold daemon, the volfs file system, and the volfs service have been removed.

  svc:/system/filesystem/volfs

• Logical device names for removable media under the /vol directory, such as /vol/dev/rdsk/... or /vol/dev/aliases/..., are no longer provided.

  To access removable media by its logical device name, the /dev device should be used. For example:

  /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0s2

• Some vold device nicknames are no longer available. The following eject -l output identifies the available device nicknames for each device and in the example, the mounted media pathnames (/media/SOL_11_X86_4):

  $ eject -l /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s2 cdrom,cdrom0,cd,cd0,sr,sr0,SOL_11_X86_4,/media/SOL_11_X86_4 /dev/diskette floppy,floppy0,fd,fd0,diskette,diskette0,rdiskette,rdiskette0

  The comma-separated list shows the nicknames that can be used to eject each device.

• Customizations that were made in vold.conf and rmmount.conf are no longer available because these configuration files no longer exist. For information about managing media customizations, see Customizing Removable Media Management.

• Commands that begin with vol* commands except for volcheck and volrmmount.

Backward Compatibility

The following features provide backward compatibility with previous Solaris removable media features:

• Removable media mount points have moved to the /media directory, which is used to mount removable media, such as CD-ROMs and USB devices. Symbolic links to /media from previous media mounts points, such as /cdrom and /rmdisk, are provided for compatibility purposes.

• The rmformat command is still available. The output of this command is identical to what it looks in previous Solaris releases with vold disabled.

  For example:

  # rmformat Looking for devices... 1. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0s2 Physical Node: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@6,0 Connected Device: TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1401 1009 Device Type: DVD Reader Bus: SCSI Size: 2.9 GB Label: <None> Access permissions: <Unknown>

• The eject command is available but has been enhanced. For more information, see Ejecting Removable Media.

Mounting and Unmounting Removable Media

Most commands that begin with vol* are removed in this release. A modified version of rmmount and a new rmumount command are available to mount and unmount removable media.

These commands can be used to mount by device name, label, or mount point. For example, to mount an iPod:

% rmmount ipod

For example, to unmount the file systems on a DVD:

# rmumount cdrom
cdrom /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s5 unmounted
cdrom /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s0 unmounted

For more information, see the rmmount(1M) man page.

Mounting and Unmounting Diskettes

You can use the existing volcheck command to manually poll diskettes and mount them if a new diskette is detected.

If you manually reformat diskette after it is connected to the system, HAL is not automatically notified. Continue to use the volcheck command to notify the system and attempt to automount a new file system on a diskette.

Ejecting Removable Media

As in previous Solaris releases, use the eject command to unmount and eject removable media. However, the following eject options are available:

-f

Forces the device to eject even if the device is busy.

-l

Displays paths and nicknames of devices that can be ejected.

-t

A CD-ROM tray close command is provided to the device. Not all devices support this option.

For example, to eject by its volume label:

% eject mypictures

As in previous Solaris releases, you might need to issue the volcheck command before using the eject command to eject a diskette.

For more information, see the eject(1) man page.

Customizing Removable Media Management

For most customizations that were available in the vold.conf and rmmount.conf files, you will need to either use Desktop Volume manager preferences or modify the .fdi files.

• For rmmount.conf actions, you will need to use either Desktop Volume Manager actions, gconf, or HAL callouts.

• Previously, rmmount.conf actions could be run as root on behalf of ordinary users. Now, this is done by installing callout executables in the /usr/lib/hal directory.

Disabling Removable Media Features

You can disable some or all removable media features in this release:

• To prevent volumes from mounting outside of user sessions, disable the rmvolmgr service. For example:

  # svcadm disable rmvolmgr

• To prevent any volume management, disable the dbus, hal, and rmvolmgr services.

  # svcadm disable rmvolmgr # svcadm disable dbus # svcadm disable hal

  Disabling these services means that you would have to mount all media manually by using the mount command.