Managing the file system

From Initq

We are going to see first how Solaris views the disk drives and various other hardware components.

Device Drivers

Device driver is a low-level program that allows the kernel to communicate with a specific piece of hardware. In Solaris, each disk device is described in three ways, using three distint naming conventions:

Physical device name

Represents the full device pathname in the device information hierarchy.

-bash-3.00# dmesg | grep ide                                                
Jun  6 23:57:37 sun86 pci: [ID 370704 kern.info] PCI-device: ide@1, ata1    
Jun  6 23:57:37 sun86 genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] ata1 is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@2,5/ide@1
Jun  6 23:57:38 sun86 genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] sd2 is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@2,5/ide@1/sd@1,0
 
Jun  7 00:07:46 sun86 genunix: [ID 678236 kern.info] Ethernet address = 0:50:8b:b2:f0:b9
Jun  7 00:07:46 sun86 gld: [ID 944156 kern.info] iprb4: Intel 82558/82559 Ver 0.010.6 Driver: type "ether" mac
 address 00:50:8b:b2:f0:b9
Jun  7 00:07:46 sun86 pci_pci: [ID 370704 kern.info] PCI-device: pcie11,b01f@4, iprb4
Jun  7 00:07:46 sun86 genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] iprb4 is /pci@0,0/pci1011,24@a/pcie11,b01f@4

So the full device pathname for ide device is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@2,5/ide@1/sd@1,0 and for our ethernet adapter it is /pci@0,0/pci1011,24@a/pcie11,b01f@4. You can use the dmesg command to get this information. The actual dmesg file is located at /var/adm/messages. The physical devices are located at /devices/pci@0,0/pci1011,24@a for ethernet /devices/pci@0,0/pci-ide@2,5/ide@1 for the ide You can also use prtconf, sysdef, dmesg and format to get information on physical devices.

Instance name

Represents the kernel's abbreveation name for every possible device on the system.

Logical device name

Used by system admins with most file systems commands to refer to devices.