The dev filesystem manages the name spaces of devices under the Solaris operating environment. The global zone's instance of the dev filesystem is mounted during boot on /dev.
A subdirectory under /dev can have unique operational semantics. Most of the common device names under /dev are created automatically by devfsadm(1M). Others, such as /dev/pts, are dynamic and reflect the operational state of the system. You can manually generate device names for newly attached hardware by invoking devfsadm(1M) or implicitly, by indirectly causing a lookup or readdir operation in the filesystem to occur. For example, you can discover a disk that was attached when the system was powered down (and generate a name for that device) by invoking format(1M)).
The /dev/zvol/dsk and /dev/zvol/rdsk directories are generated based on the ZFS dataset hierarchy. Each ZFS file system is represented in /dev/zvol/dsk and /dev/zvol/rdsk as a directory. Each ZFS volume and each snapshot of a ZFS volume is represented as a block device in /dev/zvol/dsk and as a character device in /dev/zvol/rdsk. Within the global zone, symbolic links to device nodes within /devices are used instead of device nodes. See devfs(7FS)
Within non-global zones, the names that appear under /dev/zvol represent the aliased dataset names. See zonecfg(1M).
Within non-global zones, devices that are added by way of device resources can have the same name as those that appear in the aliased dataset namespace. See zonecfg(1M) . If such conflicts occur, the device file corresponding to the device resource is seen and any corresponding /dev/zvol entries for datasets that are delegated to the zone is not seen. For example, if the device /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/vol1 is added as a device resource and the within the non-global zone the volume rpool/vol1 is created, the file /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/vol1 is the device allocated from the global zone, not the one that appears within the non-global zone's aliased dataset namespace.
Mount point for the /dev filesystem in the global zone.
devfsadm(1M), format(1M), zonecfg(1M)
The global /dev instance cannot be unmounted.