Manual Pages  — MAKEFS

makefs – create a file system image from a directory tree or a mtree manifest

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION FFS-specific options CD9660-specific options msdos-specific options zfs-specific options SEE ALSO HISTORY AUTHORS

makefs [-DxZ] [-B endian] [-b free-blocks] [-d debug-mask] [-F mtree-specfile] [-f free-files] [-M minimum-size] [-m maximum-size] [-N userdb-dir] [-O offset] [-o fs-options] [-R roundup-size] [-S sector-size] [-s image-size] [-T timestamp] [-t fs-type] image-file directory | manifest [extra-directory ...]

The utility makefs creates a file system image into image-file from the directory tree directory or from the mtree manifest manifest. If any optional directory trees are passed in the extra-directory arguments, then the directory tree of each argument will be merged into the directory or manifest first before creating image-file. No special devices or privileges are required to perform this task.

The options are as follows:

-B endian
	Set the byte order of the image to endian. Valid byte orders are ‘4321’, ‘big’, or ‘be’ for big endian, and ‘1234’, ‘little’, or ‘le’ for little endian. Some file systems may have a fixed byte order; in those cases this argument will be ignored.
-b free-blocks
	Ensure that a minimum of free-blocks free blocks exist in the image. An optional ‘%’ suffix may be provided to indicate that free-blocks indicates a percentage of the calculated image size.
-D
	Treat duplicate paths in an mtree manifest as warnings not error. If this flag is specified more than once, warnings about duplicate paths are not printed at all.
-d debug-mask
	Enable various levels of debugging, depending upon which bits are set in debug-mask. This option is intended for source debugging. debug-mask is a bit map defined in the header file makefs.h. See the source for usage, and look for defines starting with DEBUG_.
-F mtree-specfile
	This is almost certainly not the option you are looking for. To create an image from a list of files in an mtree format manifest, specify it as the last argument on the command line, not as a the argument to -F. Use mtree-specfile as an mtree(8) 'specfile' specification. This option has no effect when the image is created from a mtree manifest rather than a directory. If a specfile entry exists in the underlying file system, its permissions and modification time will be used unless specifically overridden by the specfile. An error will be raised if the type of entry in the specfile conflicts with that of an existing entry. In the opposite case (where a specfile entry does not have an entry in the underlying file system) the following occurs: If the specfile entry is marked optional, the specfile entry is ignored. Otherwise, the entry will be created in the image, and it is necessary to specify at least the following parameters in the specfile: type, mode, gname, or gid, and uname or uid, and link (in the case of symbolic links). If time is not provided, the current time will be used. If flags is not provided, the current file flags will be used. Missing regular file entries will be created as zero-length files.
-f free-files
	Ensure that a minimum of free-files free files (inodes) exist in the image. An optional ‘%’ suffix may be provided to indicate that free-files indicates a percentage of the calculated image size.
-M minimum-size
	Set the minimum size of the file system image to minimum-size.
-m maximum-size
	Set the maximum size of the file system image to maximum-size. An error will be raised if the target file system needs to be larger than this to accommodate the provided directory tree.
-N userdb-dir
	Use the user database text file master.passwd and group database text file group from userdb-dir, rather than using the results from the system's getpwnam(3) and getgrnam(3) (and related) library calls.
-O offset
	Instead of creating the filesystem at the beginning of the file, start at offset. Valid only for ffs and msdos.
-o fs-options
	Set file system specific options. fs-options is a comma separated list of options. Valid file system specific options are detailed below.
-p
	Deprecated. See the -Z flag.
-R roundup-size
	Round the image up to roundup-size. roundup-size should be a multiple of the file system block size. This option only applies to the ffs file system type.
-S sector-size
	Set the file system sector size to sector-size. Defaults to 512.
-s image-size
	Set the size of the file system image to image-size. This is equivalent to setting both the minimum -( -M) and the maximum -( -m) sizes to the same value. For ffs and msdos the image-size does not include the offset. offset is not included in that size.
-T timestamp
	Specify a timestamp to be set for all filesystem files and directories created so that repeatable builds are possible. The timestamp can be a pathname, where the timestamps are derived from that file, or an integer value interpreted as the number of seconds from the Epoch. Note that timestamps specified in an mtree(5) spec file, override the default timestamp.
-t fs-type
	Create an fs-type file system image. The following file system types are supported:
ffs	BSD fast file system (default).
cd9660
	ISO 9660 file system.
msdos	FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32 file system.
zfs	ZFS pool containing one or more file systems.

-x
	Exclude file system nodes not explicitly listed in the specfile.
-Z
	Create a sparse file for ffs. This is useful for virtual machine images.

Where sizes are specified, a decimal number of bytes is expected. Two or more numbers may be separated by an "x" to indicate a product. Each number may have one of the following optional suffixes:

b	Block; multiply by 512
k	Kibi; multiply by 1024 (1 KiB)
m	Mebi; multiply by 1048576 (1 MiB)
g	Gibi; multiply by 1073741824 (1 GiB)
t	Tebi; multiply by 1099511627776 (1 TiB)
w	Word; multiply by the number of bytes in an integer

ffs images have ffs-specific optional parameters that may be provided. Each of the options consists of a keyword, an equal sign (‘=’), and a value. The following keywords are supported:

avgfilesize	Expected average file size.
avgfpdir	Expected number of files per directory.
bsize	Block size.
density	Bytes per inode. If unset, will allocate the minimum number of inodes to represent the filesystem if no free space has been requested (free blocks or minimum size set); otherwise the larger of the newfs defaults or what is required by the free inode parameters if set.
fsize	Fragment size.
label	Label name of the image.
maxbpg	Maximum blocks per file in a cylinder group.
minfree	Minimum % free.
optimization
	Optimization preference; one of ‘space’ or ‘time’.
extent	Maximum extent size.
maxbpcg	Maximum total number of blocks in a cylinder group.
version	UFS version. 1 for FFS (default), 2 for UFS2.
softupdates	0 for disable (default), 1 for enable

cd9660 images have ISO9660-specific optional parameters that may be provided. The arguments consist of a keyword and, optionally, an equal sign (‘=’), and a value. The following keywords are supported:

allow-deep-trees	Allow the directory structure to exceed the maximum specified in the spec.
allow-illegal-chars	Allow illegal characters in filenames. This option is not implemented.
allow-lowercase	Allow lowercase characters in filenames. This option is not implemented.
allow-max-name	Allow 37 instead of 33 characters for filenames by omitting the version id.
allow-multidot	Allow multiple dots in a filename.
applicationid	Application ID of the image.
archimedes	Use the ‘ARCHIMEDES’ extension to encode RISC OS metadata.
bootimagedir	Boot image directory. This option is not implemented.
chrp-boot	Write an MBR partition table to the image to allow older CHRP hardware to boot.
boot-load-segment	Set load segment for the boot image.
bootimage	Filename of a boot image in the format "sysid;filename", where "sysid" is one of ‘efi’, ‘i386’, ‘mac68k’, ‘macppc’, or ‘powerpc’.
generic-bootimage	Load a generic boot image into the first 32K of the cd9660 image.
hard-disk-boot	Boot image is a hard disk image.
isolevel	An integer representing the ISO 9660 interchange level where "level" is either ‘1’ or ‘2’. "level" ‘3’ is not implemented.
keep-bad-images	Do not discard images whose write was aborted due to an error. For debugging purposes.
label	Label name of the image.
no-boot	Boot image is not bootable.
no-emul-boot	Boot image is a "no emulation" ElTorito image.
no-trailing-padding	Do not pad the image (apparently Linux needs the padding).
omit-trailing-period
	Omit trailing periods in filenames.
platformid	Set platform ID of section header entry of the boot image.
preparer	Preparer ID of the image.
publisher	Publisher ID of the image.
rockridge	Use RockRidge extensions (for longer filenames, etc.).
verbose	Turns on verbose output.
volumeid	Volume set identifier of the image.

The makefs utility appeared in NetBSD It was ported to FreeBSD and first appeared in FreeBSD 8.0 .

Luke Mewburn <Mt lukem@NetBSD.org> (original program), Daniel Watt, Walter Deignan, Ryan Gabrys, Alan Perez-Rathke, Ram Vedam (cd9660 support), Christos Zoulas (msdos support), Mark Johnston (zfs support).