/devices .. Solaris 10

[dandan123]

We are using TSM to backup our servers and the /devices folder keeps failing backups.

I may be wrong but I think /devices is new to Solaris 10 ?

Does anyone have info on what it's purpose is ?

 

[djr111]

/devices as far as I can remember has been an vital part of the OS

well I guess we can go back one step.

/dev, the contents of this directory are all symbolic links to /devices.

lets say your machine had a /dev/dsk/c3t3d0s2 in /dev. you would know that by doing a ls -la on /dev.

you would then see that it points back to /devices.

I was always told that

/dev = the logical device path to any give device
and
/devices = the physical device path to any given device.

There have been many times that I have had to remove the logical entries of a devices and had the system regenerate them again. I have done this a lot with tape drives.

ls -l1 /dev/dsk/c3t3d0s2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 61 Jul 19 17:50 /dev/dsk/c3t3d0s2 -> ../../devices/pci@0,0/pci1022,7458@11/pci1000,3060@4/sd@3,0:c

 

[dandan123]

What I meant was a /devices filesystem as opposed to a folder.

I don't remember seeing a /devices filesystem in Solaris 8 but I might be wrong. These days I work mainly on Solaris 10 so I'm unable to confirm.

But your explanation makes sense...thanks

 

[Mike042]

Prior to Solaris 10 '/devices' was a system directory that resided on disk. In Solaris 10, it became an 'In-memory' system directory. As has already been suggested, it the primary directory for physical device names.

So, I would question the need to backup it. '/devices' can be updated from 'devfsadm' (either the command or the running daemon) and more importantly can be rebuilt from scratch with a 'reconfigure reboot'.


I hope that helps.

Mike