Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

Jonathan Lundell
2001-05-16T00:25:48Z

At 4:35 PM -0700 2001-05-15, David Brownell wrote:
>[ Re why "physical" device IDs _should_ have a critical role in sysadmin ]
>
>> I would have to agree that "stable" is critical to not driving people
>> crazy. In the case of AIX, once a device is enumerated, it will retain
>> the same name across reboots. Enough information is kept about each
>> device to determine if it has already been enumerated (i.e. same I/O
>> port address for serial devices, MAC address for ethernet cards, etc),
>> or if it is a new device and should get a new name.
>
>I caught those refs to how AIX does this ... sounds worth learning from.
>Does it handle USB "port addresses" (which bus and hub)?

Solaris has a scheme that addresses the issue at well. Device nodes
live in /devices (/dev has soft links into /devices) and have
system-global-geographic names. In Solaris talk, the 0-1-2 of
eth0-1-2 i an instance. There's a file /etc/pathtoinst that records
the connection of an device instance to its /devices geographical
name.

It does keep naming stable, but can be a PITA at times when you're
reconfiguring a system and *want* to renumber things. (There are
magic ways to do it, though).

That's all Solaris 2.6; not sure about 2.8.
--
/Jonathan Lundell.