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.

Answer 1

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.