How to restart VOLD daemon or send it commands?

Question

This is the latest VOLD daemon from Android 4.3:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/vold/+/master

It uses a new unified /fstab.<device> configuration file. Once I've modified the file in the rootfs ramdisk, I need to restart VOLD or make it reload the configuration file. I can't seem to figure out the commands or any command line parameters it takes in order to do this.

Yes. It's in the ramdisk from the kernel image though. Thus changes to it don't persist. That's why I need to reload VOLD somehow after modifying it. — Monstieur, Aug 16 '13 at 11:18
It creates directories for block devices and mounts them. It needs to be gracefuly reloaded. — Monstieur, Aug 16 '13 at 17:58

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 21 '13 at 20:44

Although vold is responsible for mounting removable media, asecs and obbs it actual has little to do with the device specific fstab.<device> file.

This is instead used by the init process to mount the system and data partitions. The init process defines a command "mount_all" which takes an fstab.<device> file as a parameter. For example of the Nexus4 (mako) the the init.mako.rc script (located in device/lge/mako in the aosp source) in the "on fs" section calls

mount_all ./fstab.mako

If you are working on an existing device you will need to modify the fstab.<device> file in the ramdisk image and reflash the boot partition. This makes it difficult to do this at runtime.

Was this the same when the file was /system/etc/vold.fstab in 4.2? — Monstieur, Aug 22 '13 at 04:06
Yes. I mostly work on 4.2, and have only been just recently looking at 4.3. — OwainD, Aug 22 '13 at 15:20

How to restart VOLD daemon or send it commands?

1 Answers1