insf and mksf

[deepakinit]

difference between insf and mksf

regards,

deepak

[Sunny Jaisinghani]

hi Deepak,

insf is used to install device files while mksf is used to make special device files. refer to following links to get detailed information.


http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-60105/insf.1M.html

http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-60105/mksf.1M.html

[Mridul Shrivastava]

insf is being used for creating device files for the newly installed devices, however this is done by system every time system boots. If we add some device online and could not see the corresponding device file then insf -e will create device files for all the devices, however insf -H could be used to create device files of the devices connected to a specific hw path.

As far as mksf is concerned it is used to create device files manually , you have to give all the details like major no. and minor no. etc...

[Bill Hassell]

insf is the easy way, mksf is harder, and mknod is the most complicated. They all perform the same task: creating devicefiles. insf is easiest because you can create multiple devicefiles with a single command -- insf -e will create any missing devicefiles.

mksf is more specialized and normally not used unless you thoroughly read and understand the man page as well as your hardware requirements. mknod is virtually never used except to create non-hardware devicefiles (like /dev/null or /dev/vg09/group). The end goal of all these commands is two numbers, a major number (the driver ID) and a minor number which has the driver options for this device.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

... and there are a few cases where you definitely do not want to use mknod -- especially in tape drives. Under HP-UX it is possible for two device nodes on different machines to have exactly the same names, exactly the same major and minor device numbers, and yet have very different behaviors --- which is very unUNIX-like.

For some devices there are more capabilities than can encoded in the available minor device number bits so a portion of the minor device number is used to encode an index into an array that describes the device. Insf will manipulate this array but mknod would not have a clue that this array exists.