Disk and File System Administration - Solaris 9 System Administrator

Information Technology Reference

In-Depth Information

Instance Names

Instance names are abbreviated names that are mapped to or associated with

the physical device names of devices. These names allow devices to be quick-

ly and easily identified without requiring the use of the long and typically

complicated physical device names. An instance name typically consists of a

short driver binding name, such as sd , and an instance number. For example,

sd0 could be the instance name of the first SCSI disk and fd0 could be the

instance name of the first floppy disk drive.

The mapping of physical device names (also known as full device pathnames )

with instance names is accomplished using the /etc/path_to_inst file. This

file is rebuilt automatically when the system is reconfigured. A system is

reconfigured by using the touch /reconfigure command and rebooting or

by using the boot -r command. The format of the /etc/path_to_inst file

consists of three fields separated by tab or space characters. These fields are

described in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1

Fields of the /etc/path_to_inst File

Field

Description

Physical Name

Full physical device name or full path device name

Instance Number

The unique number (typically starting with 0)

Driver Binding Name

Name assigned to the device driver

The following listing shows the /etc/path_to_inst file for the Solaris 9

operating system on a Sparc 20.

#

# Caution! This file contains critical kernel state

#

“/iommu@f,e0000000” 0 “iommu”

“/iommu@f,e0000000/sbus@f,e0001000” 0 “sbus”

“/iommu@f,e0000000/sbus@f,e0001000/espdma@f,400000” 0 “dma”