As part of my work on Least Privilege for xVM, I worked on implementing direct file mounts. The idea is that we'd modify the Solaris support in virt-install to use these direct mounts, instead of the more laborious older method required.

A long-standing peeve of Solaris users is that in order to mount a file system image (in particular a DVD ISO image), it's a two-step process. This was less than ideal, as many other UNIX OS's made it simple to do: you'd just pass the file to the mount command, along with a special option or two, and it mounts it directly.

With my putback of 6384817 Need persistent lofi based mounts and direct mount(1m) support for lofi, this is now possible (in fact, a little easier) in Solaris. Instead of doing this:

# device=`lofiadm -a /export/solarisdvd.iso`
# mount -F hsfs $device /mnt/iso
...
# umount /mnt/iso
# lofiadm -d /export/solarisdvd.iso

it's just:

# mount -F hsfs /export/solarisdvd.iso /mnt/iso
...
# umount /export/solarisdvd.iso

Under the hood, this still uses the lofi driver, it's just automatically used at mount and unmount time. There's no need for an -o loop option as on Linux.

This is supported for most of the file systems you might need in Solaris, namely ufs, hsfs, udfs, and pcfs. This doesn't work for ZFS, as this has its own method for mounting file system images.

I was asked a couple of times why I implemented this in the kernel at all (which meant requiring file system support via vfs_get_lofi(). This was primarily to allow non-root users to access file mounts; in fact this was the primary motivation for implementing this feature from the point of view of the xVM work. In particular, if you have PRIV_SYS_MOUNT, you can do direct file mounts as well as normal mounts. This is important for virt-install, which we want to avoid running as root, but needs to be able to mount DVDs to grab the booting information for when installing a guest.

As always, there's more work that could be done. mount is not smart about relative paths, and should notice (and correct) early if you try pass a relative path as the first argument. Solaris has always (rather annoyingly) required an -F option to identify what kind of file system you're mounting, which is particularly pedantic of it. Equally the lofi driver doesn't comprehend fdisk or VTOC layouts.

Tags: Xen OpenSolaris xVM