CHAPTER 9 Adding Hardware

9.2 SunOS 5.X

For most peripherals you will not need to add a device driver, as they are already included in the operating system. For those devices that do require a new driver, the driver and instructions should accompany the system. New device drivers should come in System V package format, so that you can install them with the pkgadd command or the Software Manager tool. We will discuss these commands in a latter chapter.

The next step is to get the system to recognize the device driver. If you touch the file /reconfigure, e.g.:

# touch /reconfigure

then when the system is rebooted it will reconfigure the kernel, as discussed in the chapter on Kernel Configuration.

Now you can shutdown the system, power it off, add the new hardware, and then boot new system. You will want to be sure to power on the peripheral devices before the CPU to insure that the system will recognize the peripherals.

If you did not create the /reconfigure file you can still reconfigure the kernel during the boot process by booting with the -r (reconfigure) option to the PROM boot command, i.e.:

ok boot -r

The kernel will then recognize the new drivers during the boot process and create the necessary device entries in /devices for the attached hardware using the drvconfig command.

You can examine the currently loaded device driver list with the -i option to the sysdef command.This will output several pages of information including the list of tunable parameters for the kernel shown in the last section.

Unix System Administration - 8 AUG 1996

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