SUMMARY: PCI device assignments

Thanks to:

  Darren Dunham
  Mark Donaldson
  Julie Peers

Darren's reply was very comprehensive so I'll use that as
the summary.  

Original question:


> > I've installed two JNI fibre channel cards on a V880's
> > PCI slots 7 and 8.  Upon a reconfigure reboot (boot -r),
> > with the JNI drivers installed, two cards have been assigned
> > this way (I think):
> > 
> >  JNI Card     PCI slot
> > jnic146x0      slot 8   PCI-device: JNI,FCR@1, jnic146x0
> > jnic146x1      slot 7   PCI-device: JNI,FCR@2, jnic146x1
> > 
> > For consistency (and JNI config) reasons, I would like to
> > switch these assignments.  I have several problems.
> > 
> > 1. How do I confirm that JNI,FCR@1 is slot 8?
> > 2. How do I remove the device files (ie: is there a boot option 
> >    to remove certain devices)?
> > 3. Upon a new boot -r, how can I make sure the card on
> >    PCI slot 7 is assigned first and slot 8 next?


Answers:

1. 
> Ideally you'd compare them to a list of what slots map to where.  I
> know of such lists only for older hardware (250, 450, EX000), not for
> the new stuff.

2.
> No, that's really up to the driver.  Many do not remove devices. Read
> through the 'devfsadm' man page.

3.
> Understand what is happening.  The System wants to make a mapping so
> that if either card were to fail, the remaining card would keep the
> existing number.
> 
> So there is a static mapping from physical slot to logical instance.
> That is usually the /etc/path_to_inst file.  When a device/location
> pair is seen for the first time, a new instance number is chosen and
> the mapping is put into the file.
> 
> So really, there's no way to pick the instance numbers unless you
> could
> 
> 1) choose the probe order.  Difficult.  Normally the probe order is
>    static for hardware.
> 
> 2) Put the cards in one at a time.  Put the card you want to be "0"
> in
>    first, find it, then put in the other card.
> 
> 3) Put your own mappings in /etc/path_to_inst.  It may be enough for
>    you to remove all the /dev and /devices paths to the cards, modify
>    the path_to_inst file and swap the instance numbers for those two
>    devices, then do another boot -r.



What I did:

Edited /etc/path_to_inst file an swapped "JNI,FCR@1" and "JNI,FCR@2"
for the entire file.  Then removed the JNI related devices and 
rebooted with boot -r.  The two cards are now swapped.

Thanks again.

-mike
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