On 2015-11-26, Sven Hartge <s...@svenhartge.de> wrote: > Ed Jabbour <e...@att.net> wrote: >> Ran df -hT, and along with the usual partitions there's this: > >> /dev/block/8:3 ext4 12G 4.1G 7.3G 36% / > >> I have never seen that before. What is it? > > major:minor 8:3 would be /dev/sda3 > > See for yourself in /dev/block, it should contain symlinks to the real > devices. > > Why udev creates those symlinks and what use they may have: I don't have > a clue, I am as surprised as you.
My guess would be that the purpose is to be able to find the canonical name of a device given only the device number (i.e. the information available from stat) See also /dev/char. Why this is showing up this way in df is a different question. Does / also show up as /dev/sda3? Maybe it was mounted by the kernel and doesn't show up in /etc/mtab or /etc/fstab. How does the df command enumerate filesystems? What does fstab and mtab look like? Is the root device specified on the kernel command line e.g. root=0x0803?
