/devices/pseudo/bitbucket@0:bitbucket: Musings from the bitbucket

I've been hanging out on #opensolaris-AT-irc.freenode-DOT-net a lot recently doing my bit to help people get over the initial hump of installing Solaris and OpenSolaris. This evening we've been talking about devices, specifically NICs, and figuring out what driver they need. So how does one go about this if one has no idea what the driver should be? Well, start by running prtpicl -v and either pipe the output through /usr/bin/less or dump it to a file. Then you need to know what you're looking for: search for "Ethernet" or "Network" and you can't get too far off the track. That will appear in a stanza like this:

                 pci1458,e000 (obp-device, 187220000034b)
                  :DeviceID      0xb
                  :UnitAddress   2
                  :device-id     17184
                  :vendor-id     4523
                  :revision-id   19
                  :class-code    131072
                  :unit-address  b
                  :subsystem-id  57344
                  :subsystem-vendor-id   5208
                  :min-grant     23
                  :max-latency   31
                  :interrupts    1
                  :devsel-speed  1
                  :fast-back-to-back
                  :66mhz-capable
                  :power-consumption     01  00  00  00  01  00  00  00
                  :model         Ethernet controller
                  :compatible   (1872200000357TBL)
                   | pci11ab,4320.1458.e000.13 |
                   | pci11ab,4320.1458.e000 |
                   | pci1458,e000 |
                   | pci11ab,4320.13 |
                   | pci11ab,4320 |
                   | pciclass,020000 |
                   | pciclass,0200 |
                  :reg
 00  58  02  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00
 10  58  02  02  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  40  00  00
 14  58  02  01  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  01  00  00
 30  58  02  02  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  02  00
                  :assigned-addresses
 10  58  02  82  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  f5  00  00  00  00  00  40  00  00
 14  58  02  81  00  00  00  00  00  94  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  01  00  00
 30  58  02  82  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  00  02  00
                  :pm-hardware-state     needs-suspend-resume
                  :devfs-path    /pci@0,0/pci10de,ed@e/pci1458,e000@b
                  :driver-name   skge
                  :binding-name  pci1458,e000
                  :bus-addr      b
                  :instance      0
                  :_class        obp-device
                  :name  pci1458,e000

see, up there at :model Ethernet controller. Now the next stanza or property is the very important :compatible part. It's so important to this blog that I'll excerpt it:

                  :compatible   (1872200000357TBL)
                   | pci11ab,4320.1458.e000.13 |
                   | pci11ab,4320.1458.e000 |
                   | pci1458,e000 |
                   | pci11ab,4320.13 |
                   | pci11ab,4320 |
                   | pciclass,020000 |
                   | pciclass,0200 |

These strings are PCI Consortium identifiers. Let's walk through them one by one.

identifier	which is what?
pci11ab,4320.1458.e000.13	vendor,device.subvendor.subdevice.revision
pci11ab,4320.1458.e000	vendor,device.subvendor.subdevice
pci1458,e000	vendor,device
pci11ab,4320.13	vendor,device.revision
pciclass,020000	PCI Consortium device class, specific
pciclass,0200	PCI Consortium device class, general

Ok, that's all well and good, but how do I use that information? Well let's assume for a second that you want to find a network device in general. So searching through your prtpicl -v output you'll look for pciclass,0200. That will give you a pointer to the pci vendor,deviceid information, which you can then check /etc/driver_aliases for:

$ grep pci1458,e000 /etc/driver_aliases
skge "pci1458,e000"

This tells me that this particular pci identifier (pci1458,e000) is a device alias for the skge driver from SysKonnect. The example we came across on #opensolaris this evening was

                  :compatible   (1e4000001e7TBL)
                   | pci14e4,1677.1028.179.1 |
                   | pci14e4,1677.1028.179 |
                   | pci1028,179 |
                   | pci14e4,1677.1 |
                   | pci14e4,1677 |
                   | pciclass,020000 |
                   | pciclass,0200 |

which a quick search of /etc/driver_aliases reveals is actually a Broadcom nic which we supply a driver for. As it happens, for this particular system we had to specify more than just the vendor,deviceid: # update_drv —a —i ' "pci14e4,1677.1028.179" ' bge This reported warning: driver (bge) successfully added to the system but failed to attach which was a pain, but progress. So we asked this new user to run

# svcs clear svc:/network/physical:default

because it was showing as 'maintenance'.... and suddenly all that we had left was a piddly little routing problem. Joy! Now if we didn't supply a driver, the thing to do would be to Goooooooogle for the pci vendor,deviceid string and "solaris driver" -- for NICs you'll frequently come up with a hit for Masayuki Murayama's collection of drivers. There is a really nifty utility available for linux called lspci which will let you see what you've got installed in your system and on your motherboard. It makes use of a file of XOrg you can run /usr/X11/bin/scanpci instead.... I'm not sure whether the device mappings are hard-coded though.