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Here's how mount actually works:
The mount comand calls the mount system call, which has five arguments you
can see on the "man 2 mount" page:
int mount(const char *source, const char *target, const char *filesystemtype,
unsigned long mountflags, const void *data);
The command "mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /path/to/mntpoint -o ro,noatime",
parses its command line arguments to feed them into those five system call
arguments. In this example, the source is "/dev/sda1", the target is
"/path/to/mountpoint", and the filesystemtype is "ext2".
The other two syscall arguments (mountflags and data) come from the
"-o option,option,option" argument. The mountflags argument goes to the VFS
(explained below), and the data argument is passed to the filesystem driver.
The mount command's options string is a list of comma separated values. If
there's more than one -o argument on the mount command line, they get glued
together (in order) with a comma. The mount command also checks the file
/etc/fstab for default options, and the options you specify on the command
line get appended to those defaults (if any). Most other command line mount
flags are just synonyms for adding option flags (for example
"mount -o remount -w" is equivalent to "mount -o remount,rw"). Behind the
scenes they all get appended to the -o string and fed to a common parser.
VFS stands for "Virtual File System" and is the common infrastructure shared
by different filesystems. It handles common things like making the filesystem
read only. The mount command assembles an option string to supply to the "data"
argument of the option syscall, but first it parses it for VFS options
(ro,noexec,nodev,nosuid,noatime...) each of which corresponds to a flag
from #include <sys/mount.h>. The mount command removes those options from the
sting and sets the corresponding bit in mountflags, then the remaining options
(if any) form the data argument for the filesystem driver.
A few quick implementation details: the mountflag MS_SILENCE gets set by
default even if there's nothing in /etc/fstab. Some actions (such as --bind
and --move mounts, I.E. -o bind and -o move) are just VFS actions and don't
require any specific filesystem at all. The "-o remount" flag requires looking
up the filesystem in /proc/mounts and reassembling the full option string
because you don't _just_ pass in the changed flags but have to reassemble
the complete new filesystem state to give the system call. Some of the options
in /etc/fstab are for the mount command (such as "user" which only does
anything if the mount command has the suid bit set) and don't get passed
through to the system call.
When mounting a new filesystem, the "filesystem" argument to the mount system
call specifies which filesystem driver to use. All the loaded drivers are
listed in /proc/filesystems, but calling mount can also trigger a module load
request to add another. A filesystem driver is responsible for putting files
and subdirectories under the mount point: any time you open, close, read,
write, truncate, list the contents of a directory, move, or delete a file,
you're talking to a filesystem driver to do it. (Or when you call
ioctl(), stat(), statvfs(), utime()...)
Different drivers implement different filesystems, which have four categories:
1) Block device backed filesystems, such as ext2 and vfat.
This kind of filesystem driver acts as a lens to look at a block device
through. The source argument for block backed filesystems is a path to a
block device, such as "/dev/hda1", which stores the contents of the
filesystem in a fixed block of sequential storage, and there's a seperate
driver providing that block device.
Block backed filesystems are the "conventional" filesystem type most people
think of when they mount things. The name means that the "backing store"
(where the data lives when the system is switched off) is on a block device.
2) Server backed filesystems, such as cifs/samba or fuse.
These drivers convert filesystem operations into a sequential stream of
bytes, which it can send through a pipe to talk to a program. The filesystem
server could be a local Filesystem in Userspace daemon (connected to a local
process through a pipe filehandle), behind a network socket (CIFS and v9fs),
behind a char device (/dev/ttyS0), and so on. The common attribute is there's
some program on the other end sending and receiving a sequential bytestream.
The backing store is a server somewhere, and the filesystem driver is talking
to a process that reads and writes data in some known protocol.
The source argument for these filesystems indicates where the filesystem lives. It's often in a URL-like format for network filesystems, but it's really just a blob of data that the filesystem driver understands.
A lot of server backed filesystems want to open their own connection so they
don't have to pass their data through a persistent local userspace process,
not really for performance reasons but because in low memory situations a
chicken-and-egg situation can develop where all the process's pages have
been swapped out but the filesystem needs to write data to its backing
store in order to free up memory so it can swap the process's pages back in.
If this mechanism is providing the root filesystem, this can deadlock and
freeze the system solid. So while you _can_ pass some of them a filehandle,
more often than not you don't.
These are also known as "pipe backed" filesystems (or "network filesystems"
because that's a common case, although a network doesn't need to be inolved).
Conceptually they're char device backed filesystems (analogus to the block
device backed ones), but you don't commonly specify a character device in
/dev when mounting them because you're talking to a specific server process,
not a whole machine.
3) Ram backed filesystems, such as ramfs and tmpfs.
These are very simple filesystems that don't implement a backing store. Data
written to these gets stored in the disk cache, and the driver ignores requests
to flush it to backing store (reporting all the pages as pinned and
unfreeable).
These drivers essentially mount the VFS's page/dentry cache as if it was a
filesystem. (Page cache stores file contents, dentry cache stores directory
entries.) They grow and shrink dynamically, as needed: when you write files
into them they allocate more memory to store it, and when you delete files
the memory is freed.
There's a simple one (ramfs) that does only that, and a more complex one (tmpfs)
which adds a size limitation (by default 50%, but it's adjustable as a mount
option) so the system doesn't run out of memory and lock up if you
"cat /dev/zero > file", and can also report how much space is remaining
when asked (ramfs always says 0 bytes free). The other thing tmpfs does
is write its data out to swap space (like processes do) when the system
is under memory proessure.
Note that "ramdisk" is not the same as "ramfs". The ramdisk driver uses a
chunk of memory to implement a block device, and then you can format that
block device and mount it with a block device backed filesystem driver.
(This is the same "two device drivers" approach you always have with block
backed filesystems: one driver provides /dev/ram0 and the second driver mounts
it as vfat.) Ram disks are significantly less efficient than ramfs,
allocating a fixed amount of memory up front for the block device instead of
dynamically resizing itself as files are written into an deleted from the
page and dentry caches the way ramfs does.
Note: initramfs cpio, tmpfs as rootfs.
4) Synthetic filesystems, such as proc, sysfs, devpts...
These filesystems don't have any backing store either, because they don't
store arbitrary data the way the first three types of filesystems do.
Instead they present artificial contents, which can represent processes or
hardware or anything the driver writer wants them to show. Listing or reading
from these files calls a driver function that produces whatever output it's
programmed to, and writing to these files submits data to the driver which
can do anything it wants with it.
Synthetic ilesystems are often implemented to provide monitoring and control
knobs for parts of the operating system. It's an alternative to adding more
system calls (or ioctl, sysctl, etc), and provides a more human friendly user
interface which programs can use but which users can also interact with
directly from the command line via "cat" and redirecting the output of
"echo" into special files.
Those are the four types of filesystems: backing store can be a fixed length
block of storage, backing store can be some server the driver connects to,
backing store can not exist and the files merely reside in the disk cache,
or the filesystem driver can just make up its contents programmatically.
And that's how filesystems get mounted, using the mount system call which has
five arguments. The "filesystem" argument specifies the driver implementing
one of those filesystems, and the "source" and "data" arguments get fed to
that driver. The "target" and "mountflags" arguments get parsed (and handled)
by the generic VFS infrastructure. (The filesystem driver can peek at the
VFS data, but generally doesn't need to care. The VFS tells the filesystem
what to do, in response to what userspace said to do.)
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