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The ports command creates symbolic links from /dev/term and /dev/cua to the serial-port character device files in /devices and adds new entries in /etc/inittab for non-system ports found. System-board ports are given single lower-case letters for names (such as a and b) while other ports are named numerically.
ports searches the kernel device tree to find the serial devices attached to the system. It also checks /dev/term and /dev/cua to see what symbolic links to serial devices already exist. ports then performs the following:
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- Assigns new numbers (or letters for system-board ports) to ports that are attached to the system but do not have /dev/term and /dev/cua entries. The numbers or letters assigned are the lowest-unused numbers or letters.
.- Removes dangling links: links from /dev/term and /dev/cua pointing to no-longer-existing ports.
.- Creates new /dev/term and /dev/cua links for new serial devices.
.- Invokes sacadm(1M) to make new port monitor entries for the new devices. This is not done automatically for on-board ports; on workstations these ports are often not used for dial-in sessions, so a port-monitor for one of these ports must be created explicitly.
If the configuration has not changed, ports exits without doing anything.
Of interest to device driver writers are the devices that ports considers serial devices. Device nodes of type DDI_NT_SERIAL , DDI_NT_SERIAL_MB , DDI_NT_SERIAL_DO , and DDI_NT_SERIAL_MB_DO are considered serial devices (see ddi_create_minor_node(9F) for more information on node types).