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EGA0 and EWA0 Device Naming?

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The Question is:

 
Why does VMS see the EGA0 device on a DS25 as EWA0?

The Answer is :

 
  The LAN device naming conventions in OpenVMS attempt to use common
  names for the bus type and LAN media type, for example:
 
  Device name first letter is
    E - Ethernet
    F - FDDI
    I - Token Ring
    H - ATM
 
  Device name second letter is:
    A - FutureBus
    C - TurboChannel
    E - Unibus
    G - Fibre Channel
    L - Emulated LAN
    Q - Qbus
    R - EISA or ISA bus
    T - BI bus
    W - PCI bus
    X - XMI bus
 
  So, PCI Ethernet devices are generally called EW which includes:
    10 mbit Ethernet -          DE434, DE435, DE436 (quad), DE450
    10/100 mbit Ethernet -      DE500, DE504 (quad)
    10/100/1000 mbit Ethernet - DEGPA, DEGXA
 
  There are exceptions to the EW device naming, with the salient
  example being EI, the Intel 82558/82559 device.  The SRM console
  elected to use the device name EI and OpenVMS followed this
  lead, in an attempt to avoid introducing additional confusion.
 
  The SRM console for the DS25 and other systems that have Tigon 3 boot
  support (AlphaServer ES40, AlphaServer ES45, AlphaServer ES47,
  AlphaServer GS1280, AlphaServer DS20, and potentially other Alpha
  platforms) elected to use the device name EG.
 
  As OpenVMS expects to use the EG device name as LAN over Fibre Channel,
  and especially since G is the commonly used Fibre Channel device letter,
  there will be some confusion.
 
  Given the two-character name-space for device controller prefixes,
  some level of confusion is unfortunately inevitable.
 


  

     
     
answer written or last revised on ( 13-JAN-2003 )

     
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