Oracle Solaris ZFS Administration Guide

Managing ZFS Properties Within a Zone

After a dataset is delegated to a zone, the zone administrator can control specific dataset properties. After a dataset is delegated to a zone, all its ancestors are visible as read-only datasets, while the dataset itself is writable, as are all of its descendents. For example, consider the following configuration:


global# zfs list -Ho name
tank
tank/home
tank/data
tank/data/matrix
tank/data/zion
tank/data/zion/home

If tank/data/zion were added to a zone, each dataset would have the following properties.

Dataset 

Visible 

Writable 

Immutable Properties 

tank

Yes 

No 

tank/home

No 

tank/data

Yes 

No 

tank/data/matrix

No 

tank/data/zion

Yes 

Yes 

sharenfs, zoned, quota, reservation

tank/data/zion/home

Yes 

Yes 

sharenfs, zoned

Note that every parent of tank/zone/zion is visible as read-only, all descendents are writable, and datasets that are not part of the parent hierarchy are not visible at all. The zone administrator cannot change the sharenfs property because non-global zones cannot act as NFS servers. The zone administrator cannot change the zoned property because doing so would expose a security risk as described in the next section.

Privileged users in the zone can change any other settable property, except for quota and reservation properties. This behavior allows the global zone administrator to control the disk space consumption of all datasets used by the non-global zone.

In addition, the sharenfs and mountpoint properties cannot be changed by the global zone administrator after a dataset has been delegated to a non-global zone.