Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Mapping Device Nicknames to Full Names in Solaris 2

The boot sequence builds a tree in memory of the hardware devices present in the system; the tree is passed to the kernel and can be viewed with the prtconf command, as described in “The Openboot Device Tree — prtconf and prtdiag” on page 438. This tree is mirrored in the /devices and /dev directories; after hardware changes are made to the system, these directories must be reconfigured with the drvconfig, tapes, and disks commands that are run automatically whenever you do a boot -r. The file /etc/path_to_inst maps hardware addresses to symbolic device names. An extract from a simple configuration with the symbolic names added is shown in Figure 14-10.

When a large number of disks are configured, ...