What's New in File Systems?

The Solaris 2.6 release provides a few new file system features. Each of these new features is described in the following sections.

Large Files

A new option to the mount command, -largefiles, is the default mount option for the Solaris 2.6 environment. This option allows you to create file systems containing files larger than 2GB. The -largefiles option means that a filesystem mounted with this option may contain files larger than 2GB, but it is not a requirement. See Chapter 28, Mounting and Unmounting File Systems (Tasks) for more information on mounting file systems containing large files.

NFS Client Failover

The NFS client failover feature lets you specify additional hosts from which to mount a file system in case the first host selected cannot be reached. You can either set this up in the /etc/vfstab file, or issue your list of hosts from the command line.

WebNFS

The WebNFS^TM feature (sometimes called "Public NFS") provides two additional options to the mount command for the Solaris 2.6 release:

-index filename causes a file matching filename to be automatically loaded if it is found in a directory referenced by an NFS URL.

-public resets the public file handle to the current directory. This enables you to have access through an NFS URL even if the file system cannot be mounted by normal means.