Improvements to Volume Management (vold)

This volume management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

In this release, removable media management is improved. Previously, vold did not create device links for removable devices that contain no media. Now, device links are properly created for devices that contain no media, similar to the following:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root     28 Jun 13 13:09 /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0 
-> /vol/dev/rdsk/c2t2d0/nomedia

Now, you can use the cdrw command and the rmformat command to list devices that have no media when vold is running.

You can revert back to the previous vold behavior by changing the following support nomedia entry in the /etc/vold.conf file as follows:

support media

For more information, see the vold.conf(4) man page.

In addition, vold is now hot-plug aware. This improvement means that if you insert removable media, the media is automatically detected and mounted by vold. You do not need to restart vold manually to recognize and mount a file system from any removable media device.

For more information using these volume management improvements, see What’s New in Removable Media? in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.