Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

[Jonathan Lundell]

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.