Overview of InfiniBand Devices

IB devices are managed by the Solaris IB nexus driver. This driver supports 5 types of devices:

• IB Port devices

• IB virtual physical point of attachment (VPPA) devices

• IB HCA service (HCA_SVC) devices

• Pseudo devices

• I/O controller (IOC) devices

The IB nexus driver queries the Solaris IB Device Manager (IBDM) for services, referred in this guide as communication services, to enumerate the IB Port, HCA_SVC, and IB VPPA devices.

The Port devices bind a communication service to a given port# of a Host Channel Adapter (HCA). The VPPA devices bind a communication service to a port#, p_key# combination instead. The HCA_SVC devices bind a communication service to a given HCA. Note that the Port devices and the HCA_SVC devices always use a p_key (partition key) whose value is zero. The Port, HCA_SVC, and VPPA devices are children of the HCA and are enumerated through the ib.conf file. For more information, see ib(7D).

The IOC devices are children of the IB nexus driver and are part of an I/O unit. The pseudo devices are also children of the IB nexus driver and refer to all other devices that provide their own configuration files to enumerate. For more information, see ib(4).

The possible IB device tree path name(s) are listed in the following table.

Note that the IB HCA_SVC devices have zero as the port# and the p_key.

The IB components in the preceding table are described as follows:

<services>

Is a communication service. For example, ipib is the communication service used by the ibd kernel client driver.

<p_key>

Is the partition key value being used.

<port>

Is the port number.

<unit-address>

Refers to IB kernel client driver's property by this name specified in its driver.conf file. For more information, see driver.conf(4).