Device Nodes for Metadisks

Here are two examples of physical device nodes for disk devices under Solaris 2.x:

• /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0

• /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0

where:

c references the I/O port on the host (not the disk array) t is the bus within the disk array d is the target ID of the disk on that bus s is the slice number on the disk

These physical device nodes represent a particular physical path to a partition on a disk.

Each controller port has both a port number (such as c0) and a port name (such as pln2 or sf3). The port name consists of the port type and instance number. See /etc/path_to_inst for more information.

When a disk array is connected to two ports, it can potentially be accessed from either path via the physical device node, for example, /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 or /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0.

The device node for a metadisk is derived from the physical device node of the primary path for a pathgroup. Here are two examples of metadisk device nodes:

• /dev/ap/dsk/mc0t0d0s0

• /dev/ap/rdsk/mc0t0d0s0

As you can see, an ap directory has been added, and an m (for "meta") is prepended to the device specification. The device node for a metadisk has the ability to access the underlying physical disk drive from multiple paths.