Preventing Solaris driver unloading
When system memory is limited, Solaris unloads unused drivers from memory and reloads drivers as needed. Tape drivers are often unloaded because they are used less often than disk drivers.
The drivers NetBackup uses are the st driver (from Sun), the sg driver (from Cohesity), and Fibre Channel drivers. Problems may occur depending on when the driver loads and unloads. These problems can range from a SCSI bus not able to detect a device to system panics.
Cohesity recommends that you prevent Solaris from unloading the drivers from memory.
The following procedures describe how to prevent Solaris from unloading the drivers from memory.
To prevent Solaris from unloading the drivers from memory
- Add the following forceload statements to the /etc/system file:
forceload: drv/st forceload: drv/sg
To prevent Solaris from unloading the Fibre Channel drivers from memory
- Add an appropriate forceload statement to the /etc/system file.
Which driver you force to load depends on your Fibre Channel adapter. The following is an example for a Sun Fibre Channel driver (SunFC FCP v20100509-1.143):
forceload: drv/fcp