File System Enhancements

This section describes new features in the Solaris 8 operating environment that affect file system management and logging.

Universal Disk Format File System

The Universal Disk Format (UDF) file system, the industry-standard format for storing information on optical media technology, is supported in this Solaris release. The UDF file system can be used to exchange data on the following components when they contain a UDF file system:

• CD-ROMs

• Disks and diskettes

• Digital versatile disc or digital video disc (DVD) -- DVD-ROM on supported platforms

The UDF file system is provided as dynamically loadable, 32-bit and 64-bit modules, and contains system administration utilities for creating, mounting, and checking the file system on both SPARC and IA platforms.

When a UDF file system is mounted, users can read, write, or list files from the device, and applications can access UDF file and directories with standard system calls.

See the System Administration Guide, Volume 1 and the man page mount_udfs(1M) for more information.

This feature was first available in the Solaris 7 11/99 release.

NFS Server Logging

NFS server logging allows an NFS server to provide a record of file operations performed on its file systems. The record includes information to keep track of what is accessed, when it is accessed, and who accessed it. The location of the logs that contain this information can be specified through a set of configuration options. These options also can be used to select the operations that should be logged. This feature is particularly useful for sites that make anonymous FTP archives available to NFS and WebNFS clients.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide, Volume 3.

IA: XMEM Support

Extended Memory (XMEM) support provides a mechanism that allows a single 32-bit process to efficiently allocate and manage more than 4 Gbytes of physical memory. The XMEM feature is implemented as a file system (xmemfs) that system administrators can mount and use to reserve memory for applications.

For more information, see the man pages mount_xmemfs(1M) and xmemfs(7FS).

This feature was first available in the Solaris 7 11/99 release.

WebNFS JavaBeans Component

The WebNFS JavaBeans component contains an XFileChooser class that extends the JFileChooser graphical component of the Java 2 API. This bean can be used by any Java 2 application that needs to display a file chooser to enable users to select a file for input (open) or output (save). Using XFileChooser, an application can access a file on a local disk or on an NFS server by using NFS URL naming.

For more information, see the WebNFS Developer's Guide.

Deferred Access Time Updates on UFS File Systems

Two new mount options, dfratime and nodfratime enable and disable deferred access time updates on UFS file systems. When enabled, writing access time updates for the file system may be deferred until the disk is accessed for a reason other than updating access times. The default behavior is dfratime. Use the nodfratime option to disable this feature. In addition, the mount option, noatime, turns off access time recording regardless of the dfratime/nodfratime value.

For specific information about UFS mount options, see the mount_ufs(1M) man page.

This feature was first available in the Solaris 7 3/99 release.