device drivers . When do they get loaded

[Kyle Bolin]

I looking for when and how the device drivers (specifically SYS$EW1000A) get loaded into the system.
I don’t see a explicit call to sysman io in any of the .com startup files

[Volker Halle]

Kyle,

welcome to the OpenVMS ITRC forum.

Most device drivers in OpenVMS are loaded automatically during the device configuration phase in VMS$DEVICE_STARTUP.COM by the

SYSMAN IO AUTOCONFIGURE

command.

Volker.

[Robert Gezelter]

Kyle,

Concur. When AUTOCONFIGURE is invoked, it can load everything that it knows how to find.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[David Jones_21]

Some device drivers are loaded by the CONFIGURE process, which starts pretty early on in the boot sequence so that cluster software can function.

[Volker Halle]

Kyle,

before we explore all other possibilities of driver loading under OpenVMS, please tell us, what issue/problem are you trying to solve ?

Volker.

[Kyle Bolin]

Sure, I have a couple of gs1280 and a few es45's in a cluster, did an upgrade from
7.3-1 to 7.3-2 applied all of the patches required (update6). When the system started the autogen ran and the system rebooted.
I did the inital upgrade on a es45. When the gs1280 booted and autogen'ed the
degpa-sa device would not initalize...At the time I did not look to see if the sys$ew1000a driver was loaded or not ..
The ES45 also have a DEGPA-SA but are not in use. The card was visable in the firmware and the ewa0 device was available but the link light on the card would not startup, Network checked it out , autonegot... was set to disable
hmmm what else .. Oh ya when went back to
7.3-1 it all worked find ....
The sys$ldr has the ew1000.sys file with the correct date. That is about It ..

[Robert Brooks_1]

Why do you have autonegotiation disabled?

Absent some quite specific problem, we recommend that you allow both the switch and the ethernet card to autonegotiate. If there is a problem with autonegotiation, we'd like to know. I'm rather certain that gigabit adapters should all handle autonegotiation properly.

-- Rob

[Volker Halle]

Kyle,

it may be too late now for looking at further information, except if you forced a system crash on the GS1280 before going back to V7.3-1. The LAN$SDA extension would be able to provide additional information (SDA> LAN INTERNAL) on the state of the LAN interface.

Did you capture the console output from booting the GS1280 ? Any error messages from EWx ?

Volker.

[Eberhard Wacker]

Hi,
if you boot e.g. with -fl root-nr,10000 or root-nr,30000 you will see a lot of information when drivers are loaded etc.
Cheers,
EW

[Volker Halle]

Kyle,


The card was visable in the firmware and the ewa0 device was available but the link light on the card would not startup, Network checked it out , autonegot... was set to disable


From your description, I do not believe, that is a problem regarding 'loading' of a device driver, assuming EWA0 was 'available' after OpenVMS boot.

You could try to change the LAN speed/duplex characteristics in the running system with LANCP to see, if you can get the link up with any of the settings, see

$ MC LANCP HELP SET

Volker.