System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones

/dev and the /devices Namespace

The devfs file system described in the devfs(7FS) man page is used by the Solaris system to manage /devices. Each element in this namespace represents the physical path to a hardware device, pseudo-device, or nexus device. The namespace is a reflection of the device tree. As such, the file system is populated by a hierarchy of directories and device special files.

The /dev file hierarchy, which is today part of the / (root) file system, consists of symbolic links, or logical paths, to the physical paths present in /devices. Applications reference the logical path to a device presented in /dev. The /dev file system is loopback-mounted into the zone using a read-only mount.

The /dev file hierarchy is managed by a system comprised of the components in the following list:


Caution – Caution –

Subsystems that rely on /devices path names are not able to run in non-global zones until /dev path names are established.