Device Management Enhancements

The following device management features and enhancements have been added to the Solaris Solaris 10 8/07 release.

Enhanced st SCSI Reservations

Starting with this release, there is a new reservation mechanism in the st driver. The new mechanism enables the st driver to reserve the tape drive only when a command that requires reservations is sent. The reservation mechanism also enables the st driver to process inquiry commands issued from other hosts while the drive is reserved by a different host.

Some of Independent Software Vendor's (ISV's) backup software and media management tools benefit from the enhanced st SCSI reservations feature. Because of this new feature, management tools could inquire and browse tape libraries when the backup tool is reading or writing tapes.

CPU Power Management

This feature introduces two new power.conf keywords to permit CPU devices to be power managed independently of automatic power management. These are the new power.conf keywords:

• cpupm

  Usage:

  cpupm <behavior>

  Here, the behavior is enable or disable.

  For backward compatibility, if the cpupm keyword is not present in the /etc/power.conf file, the CPUs are power managed if autopm is enabled, and not power managed if autopm is disabled. enable or disable are independent of the autopm setting.

• cpu-threshold

  Usage:

  cpu-threshold <threshold>

  This keyword enables the user to specify a threshold which will apply to any power-manageable CPU, independent of the system-threshold value.

  If CPU power management is enabled, the power level of any CPU that is idle for the specified threshold time is reduced to the next lower level.

  If cpu-threshold is absent, system threshold is used.

  For more information, see the power.conf(4) man page.