System Administration Guide, Volume I

What's New in Device Management?

This section provides information about Solaris 7 features related to device management.

Dynamic Reconfiguration

Dynamic reconfiguration, available on certain SPARC servers, allows a service provider to remove replace hotpluggable system I/O boards in a running system, eliminating the time lost in rebooting. Also, if a replacement board is not immediately available, the system administrator can use dynamic reconfiguration to shut down a failing board while allowing the system to continue operation.

See your hardware manufacturer's documentation for informaiton about whether dynamic reconfiguration is supported on your server.

x86: SCSI Disk Driver (sd)

In previous Solaris release, SCSI disk suport on the Intel platform was handled by the cmdk driver. In the Solaris 7 release, this support is handled by the sd driver. This driver is similar to the SCSI disk driver on Solaris SPARC platforms, which is also named sd.

There is no change in the administration of these devices. System administrators will see references to sd instead of cmdk in the output of prtconf, sysdef, and dmesg commands, as well as the format utility.

Features and functionality are a superset of the features supplied by cmdk, so applications (which use logical disk names in /dev/dsk will not be affected by the driver change. x86 systems with IDE devices will still use the cmdkdriver.