Interface Card OL* Support Guide

Chapter 1
PCI Card OL* Overview and Concepts
Important Considerations
20
Important Considerations
This section presents other situations that you are likely to encounter when performing OL* operations, and
how to handle them accordingly:
“Power Domains”
“Multi-port Cards”
“Virtual Ports”
“Firmware Patch Information”
“Shared Slots”
“Frequency Mismatch”
Power Domains
A power domain is a grouping of 1 or more interface card slots that are powered on or off as a unit. As of this
release, there are no systems that support more than 1 interface card slot in a single power domain.
An OL* action using pdweb will not be allowed to take place for a card if any member of its power domain is a
critical resource.
Multi-port Cards
Some PCI cards may provide more than one function. These multi-port cards have separate hardware paths
for each port, as well as separate drivers bound at each hardware path.
An OL* action will not be allowed to take place for a card if any port is a critical resource.
Virtual Ports
Some driver designs create “virtual” ports that do not directly correspond to any physical hardware. Virtual
ports can normally be identified by the driver that controls them. For example, HP Fibrechannel Mass
Storage card drivers create virtual ports with drivers named fcp, fcpdev, fcparray, and fcpmux to control
different aspects of the fibrechannel mass storage network to which they are attached.
The pdweb GUI does not explicitly list virtual ports when discussing topics that affect physical ports, however
both types of ports are suspended and resumed as appropriate.
Since virtual ports are reported by ioscan, they will appear with the same slot ID as their corresponding
physical port.
Firmware Patch Information
For those wishing to use OL*, your system may need to update its firmware. For additional details, please
refer to the Read Before Installing or Updating to HP-UX 11i document provided with your HP product.
Shared Slots
Slots which share the same PCI or PCI-X bus are considered shared slots. The behavior of an OL* operation
on a shared slot will depend on the state of the bus which depends on whether cards are already on the other
shared slots of the bus.