Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Introduction
This chapter starts with a discussion of the naming conventions for disk
drives. This is followed by a discussion of disk administration, which covers
formatting and partitioning disks. Finally, the chapter covers file system
administration, which involves creating, checking, and mounting file systems
along with monitoring their use.
Disk Device Names
Disks, like other devices in the Solaris 9 operating system, can be referenced
using three naming conventions:
Physical device name
➤
Logical device name
➤
Instance name
➤
Physical Device Names
When the system is booted, the kernel builds a device hierarchy, referred to
as the
device tree
, to represent the devices attached to the system. This tree is
a hierarchy of interconnected buses with the devices attached to the buses as
nodes. The root node is the main physical address bus.
Each device node can have attributes such as properties, methods, and data.
In addition, each node typically has a parent node and might have children
nodes. A node with children is typically another bus, whereas a node without
children is a device attached to a bus.
The
full device pathname
identifies a device in terms of its location in the
device tree by identifying a series of
node names
separated by slashes with the
root indicated by a leading slash. Each node name in the full device path-
name has the following form:
driver-name@unit-address:device arguments
driver-name
identifies the device name,
@unit-address
is the physical address
of the device in the address space of the parent, and
:device arguments
is used
to define additional information regarding the device software. For example,
the following full device address represents a slice (or partition) of a Small
Computer System Interface (SCSI) disk drive on a SPARC system:
/sbus@1f,0/esp@0,4000/sd@3,0:a
