VFSTAB(5) File Formats and Configurations VFSTAB(5)

vfstabtable of file system defaults

The file /etc/vfstab describes defaults for each file system. The information is stored in a table with the following column headings:

device       device       mount      FS      fsck    mount      mount
to mount     to fsck      point      type    pass    at boot    options

The fields in the table are space-separated and show the resource name (device to mount), the raw device to fsck (), the default mount directory (mount point), the name of the file system type (), the number used by fsck(8) to decide whether to check the file system automatically (fsck pass), whether the file system should be mounted automatically by mountall(8) (mount at boot), and the file system mount options (mount options). See respective mount file system man page below in SEE ALSO for mount options. A ‘-’ is used to indicate no entry in a field. This may be used when a field does not apply to the resource being mounted.

The getvfsent(3C) family of routines is used to read /etc/vfstab. There are currently no library routines to automate the writing of /etc/vfstab.

/etc/vfstab can be used to specify swap areas. An entry so specified, (which can be a file or a device), will automatically be added as a swap area by the /sbin/swapadd script when the system boots. To specify a swap area, the field contains the name of the swap file or device, the is “swap”, is “no” and all other fields have no entry.

The following are /etc/vfstab entries for various file system types supported in illumos.

Example 1 NFS and UFS Mounts

The following entry invokes NFS to automatically mount the directory /usr/local of the server on the client's /usr/local directory with read-only permission:

example1:/usr/local - /usr/local nfs - yes ro

The following example assumes a small departmental mail setup, in which clients mount /var/mail from a server . The following entry would be listed in each client's /etc/vfstab:

mailsvr:/var/mail - /var/mail nfs - yes intr,bg

The following is an example for a UFS file system in which logging is enabled:

/dev/dsk/c2t10d0s0 /dev/rdsk/c2t10d0s0 /export/local ufs 3 yes logging

See mount_nfs(8) for a description of NFS mount options and mount_ufs(8) for a description of UFS options.

Example 2 pcfs Mounts

The following example mounts a pcfs file system on a fixed hard disk on an x86 machine:

/dev/dsk/c1t2d0p0:c - /win98 pcfs - yes -

The example below mounts a Jaz drive on a SPARC machine. Normally, the volume management software handles mounting of removable media, obviating a vfstab entry. Specifying a device that supports removable media in /etc/vfstab with set the mount-at-boot field to “no” (as shown below) disables the automatic handling of that device. Such an entry presumes you are not running volume management software.

/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s2:c - /jaz pcfs - no -

For removable media on a SPARC machine, the convention for the slice portion of the disk identifier is to specify , which stands for the entire medium.

For pcfs file systems on x86 machines, note that the disk identifier uses a () and a logical drive (, in the /win98 example above) for a pcfs logical drive. See mount_pcfs(8) for syntax for pcfs logical drives and for pcfs-specific mount options.

Example 3 loopback File System Mount

The following is an example of mounting a loopback (lofs) file system:

/export/test - /opt/test lofs - yes -
See lofs(4FS) for an overview of the loopback file system.

getvfsent(3C), fsck(8), mount(8), mount_hsfs(8), mount_nfs(8), mount_tmpfs(8), mount_ufs(8), swap(8)

January 16, 2022 OmniOS