How to check Fibre Channel HBAs in Linux?

Fibre Channel (FC) Host Bus Adapters (HBA) are interface cards that link the host system to a fibre channel network or devices. QLogic and Emulex are the two leading producers of FC HBAs, and many HBA drivers are provided in-box with the operating systems. If the drivers are not offered by your Linux distribution, you must manually install them and load the modules in the kernel.

This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to make sure your FC HBAs are installed and configured appropriately.

How to check Fibre Channel HBAs in Linux

Step 1: Identify the HBAs’ manufacturer and model

To view a list of all PCI cards found on the system, use the lspci command.

# lspci | grep "Fibre Channel"

Step 2: Get the HBAs’ Vendor and Device IDs installed

These are available from the /usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids file.

# vi /usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids

Step 3: Verify the driver modules’ installation

You may achieve this by looking through the list of available modules.

# grep 1077 /lib/modules/2.6.18-308.el5PAE/modules.* | grep 2532

Step 4: Verify if the kernel has loaded the drivers for these HBAs

The loaded kernel modules are listed by the lsmod program.

# lsmod | grep qla2xxx

Step 5: Recheck the verification

If the lsmod command returns no results, you can load the module using the modprobe command.

# modprobe -v qla2xxx

Step 6: Obtaining specific information

In the directory /sys/class/fc host/, you may get comprehensive details on the fibre channel adapters.

# ll /sys/class/fc_host/

Step 7: Systool command to get this information

# systool -c fc_host

Step 8: To obtain detailed output of systool command

# systool -c fc_host -v host3

Conclusion:

Fibre Channel is a high-speed networking technology that’s mostly used for sending data between data centers, servers, switches, and storage at data speeds of up to 128 Gbps.