Device Naming Conventions

Devices are referenced in three ways in the Solaris OS.

• Physical device name – Represents the full device path name in the device information hierarchy. The physical device name is created by when the device is first added to the system. Physical device files are found in the /devices directory.

• Instance name – Represents the kernel's abbreviation name for every possible device on the system. For example, sd0 and sd1 represent the instance names of two disk devices. Instance names are mapped in the /etc/path_to_inst file.

• Logical device name – The logical device name is created by when the device is first added to the system. Logical device names are used with most file system commands to refer to devices. For a list of file commands that use logical device names, see Table 5–3. Logical device files in the /dev directory are symbolically linked to physical device files in the /devices directory.

The preceding device name information is displayed with the following commands:

• dmesg

• format

• sysdef

• prtconf