Re: booting and fiber disks (SUMMARY)



> From all of the emails that I received, it appears that the system needs
> to scan all of the hardware before booting on the specified device.

This might be overly pedantic, but I believe the scan (usually referred to
as "I/O roll call") is done *after* booting. It's done quite early in the
OS initialization so that AIX can find out what devices are present. AIX
has to know what disks are present before he can mount filesystems or even
start up the paging devices. The hardware (as far as I know) doesn't have
a way of presenting a list of only disk devices to AIX, so AIX scans for
all devices. Besides, AIX will need to know about network cards and all
the rest of the I/O configuration soon enough, so it makes sense to just
do the scan once.

anker

ps: I never use the little fibre port caps (we call them "Barbie
binoculars") either. I've never had problems with fibre I/O hanging
without them--or dust, as far as that goes.



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