Device Naming Conventions

Devices are referenced in three ways in the Solaris environment.

• Physical device name – Represents the full device pathname in the device information hierarchy. Physical device names are displayed by using the following commands:

  • dmesg

  • format

  • sysdef

  • prtconf

  Physical device files are found in the /devices directory.

• Instance name – Represents the kernel's abbreviation name for every possible device on the system. For example, sd0 and sd1 represent the instance names of two disk devices. Instance names are mapped in the /etc/path_to_inst file and are displayed by using the following commands:

  • dmesg

  • sysdef

  • prtconf

• Logical device name – Used with most file system commands to refer to devices. For a list of file commands that use logical device names, see Table 9–1. Logical device files in the /dev directory are symbolically linked to physical device files in the /devices directory.