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Managing Devices in Oracle® Solaris 11.3

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Updated: April 2018
 
 

About Device Drivers

A computer uses a wide range of peripheral devices and mass-storage devices such as drives, printers, and so on. The Oracle Solaris software does not directly communicate with all of these devices. Each type of device requires different data formats, protocols, and transmission rates.

A device driver is a low-level program that enables the operating system to communicate with a specific piece of hardware. The driver serves as the operating system's “interpreter” for that piece of hardware.

You can customize a driver configuration by adding or modifying either a per-device parameter or a global property in that driver's configuration file. The addition or modification impacts all devices in the system. In the Oracle Solaris 11 release, driver customizations are made in the /etc/driver/drv directory rather than in the /kernel directory as in previous releases. Files in the /etc/driver/drv directory are preserved during the upgrade. Thus, your driver customizations are not overwritten when the system is upgraded.

How to Customize a Driver Configuration

  1. Become an administrator.

    For more information, see Using Your Assigned Administrative Rights in Securing Users and Processes in Oracle Solaris 11.3.

  2. Copy the original vendor supplied driver.conf file to the /etc/driver/drv directory. For example:
    # cp /kernel/drv/sd.conf /etc/driver/drv/sd.conf
  3. Modify the parameter entry and save the file.

    For example, the sd.conf includes the following entry for sd device at target 0, lun 0:

    name="sd" class="scsi" target=0 lun=0;

    To add the retries parameter for this device, modify the existing entry as follows:

    name="sd" class="scsi" target=0 lun=0 retries=4;
  4. Display the customized property value. For example:
    # prtconf -vu
    sd, instance #1
    Admin properties:
    name='retries' type=int items=1
    value=00000004