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.