What's New in the Solaris 8 Operating Environment

Improved Device Configuration (devfsadm )

The devfsadm command provides an improved mechanism for managing the special device files in the /dev and /devices directories, including support for dynamic reconfiguration events.

In previous Solaris releases, device configuration was handled by drvconfig, which managed the physical device entries in the /devices directory, and five link generators, devlinks, disks, tapes, ports, and audlinks, which managed the logical device entries in the /dev directory. For compatibility purposes, drvconfig and the other link generators are symbolic links to the devfsadm utility.

Both reconfiguration boot processing and updating the /dev and /devices directories in response to dynamic reconfiguration events are handled by devfsadmd, the daemon version of the devfsadm command. This daemon is started from the /etc/rc* scripts when a system is booted.

Since devfsadmd, the devfsadm daemon, automatically detects device configuration changes generated by any reconfiguration event, there is no need to run this command interactively.

This feature was first available in the Solaris 7 11/99 release.

For more information, see the man page devfsadm(1M).