[illumos-Developer] dgroup.tab and friends

[Peter Tribble]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org> 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".
>
> 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.

I think it's aimed at providing a hardware inventory. Which would actually
be a really nifty thing to have. (We have some good ways to get that
information, but nothing quite as simple and straightforward.)

I haven't actually got access to an AIX box at the moment - it would be handy
to see what this looks like on a live system.

As we completely lack anything that actually manages the contents of the
database (aside from populating the disk list at first boot, by the looks of
it), the framework is pretty useless and plain broken as it stands, and I
don't see any problem with ripping it out. If we were going to implement
this functionality, we almost certainly wouldn't use the existing code as a
base (and I'm guessing maintaining the dgroup.tab file wouldn't be the way
to go).

A quick look across my systems indicates no evidence that any of them have
ever had the dgrp commands used apart from the use of putdgrp at first boot
time (which includes a zone first boot).

Still, it would be nice to document this in a bug, so that if someone were to
come along they knew why it was ripped out. (Although if someone did want
it back then presumably they would actually understand what it was for!)

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/