Hello Brennan, Brennan Vincent [2009-09-07 23:41 -0700]: > I have two partitions on my hard drive: one containing Ubuntu and the > other containing Vista. The Vista partition is called "OS". It is not > mounted on boot, but it appears in the Gnome "Places" menu. When > clicked, the user is asked to grant root privileges in order to mount > the device in the proper place (/media/OS). > > My question is: what is the mechanism for this?
In Karmic it works roughly like this: * All storage devices are detected by the Kernel, and put into /sys. Look at /sys/block/*. This also contains the information whether a device is removable or fixed. * udev reads /sys and imports these devices into its database. It also does some probing to find out the file system, partition type, etc. Look at /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules and /lib/udev/rules.d/95-devkit-disks.rules http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev.html * GNOME, in particular gvfs, reads the udev database and creates "volumes" for them: "gvfs-mount -li" displays the status This is what appears in the places menu. * When you try to mount a device, gvfs contacts DeviceKit-disks over D-Bus (since mounting needs root, it can't do it itself), and DK-disks does the mount into /media, either by label or by UUID. http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/DeviceKit-disks/ In Ubuntu 9.04 and below, the udev/devicekit-disks part was done by "Hal", but that's being deprecated now. Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org) -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
