[illumos-Developer] dgroup.tab and friends

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 19:24 +0000, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
> Peter Tribble wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Andrew Gabriel
> > <illumos at cucumber.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> >>> I've recently been looking in some libraries (libadm, libpkg, etc.) and
> >>> ran across a bunch of code for managing dgroup.tab.  I was curious.. I
> >>> find some commands getdgrp, listdgrp, etc, which seem aimed at managing
> >>> something called "device groups".
> >>>
> >>> Searching online, I found some references to this stuff in man pages,
> >>> but I can't seem to find any actual examples of how this is used, or
> >>> evidence that it is even useful.
> >>>
> >>> Does anyone here have background information?
> >> It's related to Sun Cluster. I believe it's a group of devices (possibly
> >> just disks) which failover as one unit, but I'm not a Sun Cluster expert.
> > 
> > Hm, I suspect not. It's also present in SCO and AIX at least. This looks
> > like something somebody thought was a good idea for SVR4 rather than
> > something specific to sun cluster. Certainly the AIX implementation looks
> > like it's actually used and kept up to date, whereas the Solaris one looks
> > very stale.
> 
> Yes, you're right. The Sun cluster device groups are a completely 
> different set of commands.
> 


What's it used for in AIX?  I do think this came with SVR4, but I am
having trouble seeing what the *point* is.  Would anyone miss it if it
vanished on Solaris?  My first gut instinct is "no" based on perusal of
Google results, but I've been surprised before.  Which is why I'm asking
here.

	- Garrett