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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 2

ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 2

11.07.2013 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Following up from Part 1 where I provided an overview of the new Native Device Driver architecture introduced in ESXi 5.5, we will now take a deeper look at how this new device driver model works in ESXi. A new concept of driver priority loading is introduced with the Native Device Driver model and the diagram below provides the current ordering of how device drivers are loaded.

As you can see OEM drivers will have the highest priority and by default Native Drivers will be loaded before "legacy" vmklinux drivers. On a clean installation of ESXi 5.5 you should see at least two of these directories: /etc/vmware/default.map.d/ and /etc/vmware/driver.map.d/ which contains driver map files pertaining to Native Device and "legacy" vmklinux drivers.

Here is a screenshot of the map files for both of these directories on an ESXi host:

The following inbox Native Drivers are included in default installation of ESXi 5.5:

Device Device Driver Name
Emulex 10GBe NIC elxnet
Emulex FC lpfc
LSI Megaraid lsi_mr3
LSI mptsas lsi_msgpt3
Micron SSD mtip32xx_native
QLogic FC qlnativefc
SAS/SATA rste
vmxnet3 & graphics vmkernel

As I mentioned earlier, Native Drivers by default will always load before vmklinux drivers, however if you need to perform some troubleshooting, one option is to disable the specific driver in question by using ESXCLI which is applicable to both Native Drivers as well as vmklinux drivers.

To do so, run the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli system module set --enabled=false --module=[DRIVER-NAME]

More from my site

  • ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 1
  • A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN
  • Does VSAN work with Free ESXi?
  • ESXi 5.5 Kickstart script for setting up VSAN
  • Does reinstalling ESXi with an existing VSAN Datastore wipe your data?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.5, native device driver, nddk, vmklinux, vSphere 5.5

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  1. TinkerTry IT @ home | What does long list of consumer devices deprecated and unsupported in ESXi 5.5 mean? says:
    07/06/2014 at 6:06 pm

    […] ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 1 by William Lam, Oct 28 2013. ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 2 by William Lam, Nov 07 […]

    Reply
  2. vmkドライバーとネイティブドライバーの違い | VMwareな日々 says:
    02/20/2019 at 12:26 am

    […] http://www.virtuallyghetto.com […]

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  3. What is the Impact of the VMKlinux Driver Stack Depreciation? – VMPRO.AT – all about virtualization says:
    04/11/2019 at 2:45 am

    […] ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 2 […]

    Reply
  4. What is the Impact of the VMKlinux Driver Stack Deprecation? – VMPRO.AT – all about virtualization says:
    04/11/2019 at 7:44 am

    […] ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 2 […]

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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