Uwe Dippel wrote: >But the kernels I have used until now (mainly Linux and BSD) would load the >drivers for the disk >controllers, keyboard, even mouse, NIC and so forth if I >moved the single drive of a system >physically as a single drive into a new >box. The only item to be moved eventually was a 'wd' to 'sd' >or similar.
Yes, A Generic BSD kernel would discover devices that it has internal Drivers for at boot up. Solaris does not have a monolithic kernel so it only loads drivers as requested. The process here is that the Utility devfsadm(1m) ( which can be run manually for an inflight reconfiguration ) is used in concert with the contents of /etc/driver_aliases, to discover what hardware exists on a given system . A software/driver package for a particular bit of hardware is supposed to update /etc/driver_aliases with the relevant information. When devfsadm(1m) runs it updates /etc/path_to_inst and the /devices directory tree with the links to the driver it found form /etc/driver_aliases . this then causes relevant add_drv(1m) or rem_drv(1M) to be run. to touch the file /reconfigure means that the system will run a background devfsadm(1M) run at the next boot up. A Few years ago most workstation/desktop class PC's all used a more or less standard ATA/E-IDE disk interface. ( the list of supported devices on any IDE driver for linux/BSD/Solaris is long and booreing :-) ) With the Introduction of SAS and SATA the picture is fragmenting and you cant be reaonably sure anymore that SATA driver for one hardware works with another brand SATA controller. //Lars This message posted from opensolaris.org
