topic Re: Major number has changed. in Operating System - HP-UX

Major number has changed.

Leif Halvarsson_2 — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 08:56:10 GMT

Hi,

Perhaps a "mission impossible" but can anyone shed a light over this behaviour.

We uses a Process automation system (Advant station) which is based on HP-UX hardware. In the workstations (B180) is a propritarity card (real time accelerator) installed which uses a propritarity driver.

After backingup/restoring a system using Ignite, the card won't start up.

Troubleshooting showed that the major number for the driver has changed. It was possible to get the card working after recreating the devicefile, using the "new" major number.

Why has the major number changed and, is it possible to preserve the numbers when using Ignite.

Re: Major number has changed.

John Poff — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 09:21:31 GMT

Hi Leif,

The device file for the driver would probably be created by the 'insf' command, which would get the major number information for the device from a file in /usr/conf/master.d. Do you have a file in that directory that matches your driver name? If so, you might check there and see what major number it is configured for.

JP

Re: Major number has changed.

Leif Halvarsson_2 — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 10:01:16 GMT

Hi,
Interesting. I have not access to the workstation for the moment but, I will check as soon as possible.

Where in the restore process is /usr/conf/master.d created, when installing the "mini-system" or from the Recovery archive.

As I have understand, the "ordinary" devicefiles (in /dev ) is created before installing the Recovery archive and, based on the actual hardware, not extracted from the archive.

Re: Major number has changed.

Sameer_Nirmal — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 10:21:42 GMT

Hi,

Since you recreated the device file with new number, and it is working , the driver is dynamic. For dynamic driver, un-used major
number get allocated referring /usr/conf/masted.d file. I guess when the recovery was made, there must be major number re-shuffling occured
with changes in the "master.d file and the kernel. The mis-match could be known looking at device file using "ll" and lsdev commands. What could happen in your case the is the major number might be used by some other driver. If this "some" driver is static, then it has to have that major number. The bottom line is the mis-match of major number between running kernel and the actual device file attribute.
You can take a look at 3 entites , the "master.d " file, running kernel , and the drive file attributes.