5.3.3. Filesystem Options

These options add support for various filesystems. You must include at least one of these to support the device you boot from; typically this will be FFS if you boot from a hard drive, or NFS if you are booting a diskless workstation from Ethernet. You can include other commonly-used filesystems in the kernel, but feel free to comment out support for filesystems you use less often (perhaps the MS-DOS filesystem?), since they will be dynamically loaded from the Loadable Kernel Module directory /lkm the first time you mount a partition of that type.

options FFS

The basic hard drive filesystem; leave it in if you boot from the hard disk.

options NFS

Network Filesystem. Unless you plan to mount partitions from a Unix file server over Ethernet, you can comment this out.

options MSDOSFS

MS-DOS Filesystem. Unless you plan to mount a DOS formatted hard drive partition at boot time, you can safely comment this out. It will be automatically loaded the first time you mount a DOS partition, as described above. Also, the excellent mtools software (in the ports collection) allows you to access DOS floppies without having to mount and unmount them (and does not require MSDOSFS at all).

options ``CD9660''

ISO 9660 filesystem for CD-ROMs. Comment it out if you do not have a CD-ROM drive or only mount data CD's occasionally (since it will be dynamically loaded the first time you mount a data CD). Audio CD's do not need this filesystem.

options PROCFS

Process filesystem. This is a pretend filesystem mounted on /proc which allows programs like ps(1) to give you more information on what processes are running.

options MFS

Memory-mapped file system. This is basically a RAM disk for fast storage of temporary files, useful if you have a lot of swap space that you want to take advantage of. A perfect place to mount an MFS partition is on the /tmp directory, since many programs store temporary data here. To mount an MFS RAM disk on /tmp, add the following line to /etc/fstab and then reboot or type mount /tmp:

/dev/wd1s2b   /tmp mfs rw 0 0 

Note: Replace the /dev/wd1s2b with the name of your swap partition, which will be listed in your /etc/fstab as follows:

/dev/wd1s2b none swap sw 0 0

Note: Also, the MFS filesystem can not be dynamically loaded, so you must compile it into your kernel if you want to experiment with it.

options QUOTA

Enable disk quotas. If you have a public access system, and do not want users to be able to overflow the /home partition, you can establish disk quotas for each user. This code is a little buggy, so do not enable it unless you have to. View the manual page for quota(1) to learn more about disk quotas.