[geeks] Swapping Sparc boxes...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote:

> Yes.  Although is /devices/pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at 0,0:a,raw really much better?

Oh no, not at all. :)

But that's why there's devalias for when you actually have to deal with
the OpenBoot path.

> I suspect the one below is more meant to be used...
> > > /dev/sd/c0b0t1u0p3.

Yeah, that's pretty nice.  It still has the extra number, and it uses
"u" for unit (instead of "d" for disk, which will overwhelmingly be the
case), but it's a whole world of improvement over /dev/sd?.

At that point, the $64 question is:

  "Does Linux have a facility to remember what number a particular HBA
   got the last time the system booted up?"

The real win in the Solaris world is that, if you add a HBA, you're
guaranteed that it'll have the highest controller number (once booted
into Solaris, that is).  If you have c0, c1, c2, and c3, the next one
will be c4.  If you yank c3 later, c4 is still c4.

If Linux can't do that, they've really only solved half the problem,
although, it's still a welcome improvement.

> I also wonder why the two forms insist on using DIFFERENT nomenclature.
> Is it so wrong to be somewhat consistent?  Why c0 when they call it
> host0 above?  Why u0 for lun0?

Probably a combination of wanting to mimic SunOS 5 and someone getting a
hair up their backside about LUNs not always being "disks".

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Earth works.  That's proof positive that Mother
Elgin, TX         (   Nature isn't a suit."            --Dave McGuire