In many cases, virtualization via virtual I/O servers is made possible by the interaction of physical devices and virtual devices. The administration of devices, especially on a virtual I/O server, is therefore of central importance. The commands available for the administration of devices can be listed using “vios help dev“:

$ vios help dev
USAGE: vios [<option> ...] <keyword> [<option> ...] [<argument> ...]

Recognized keywords for topic 'dev' are:
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] cfgdev <vios> [<device>|<physloc>]
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] chdev [-f] [-P] <vios> <device>|<physloc> <attribute> ...
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] chkdev [{-o <format>|-f|-j|-y}] [-F <fields>] [-s <selections>] <vios>
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] lsattr [{-o <format>|-f|-j|-y}] [-F <fields>] [-s <selections>] [-R] <vios> <device>|<physloc> [<attribute>]
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] lsdev [-c] [-d] [{-o <format>|-f|-j|-y}] [-F <fields>] [-s <selections>] [-t <device_type>] <vios> [<device>|<physloc>]
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] lspv [{-o <format>|-f|-j|-y}] [-F <fields>] [-s <selections>] <vios>
[-h <hmc>] [-m <ms>] rmdev [-d] [-f] [-R] [-v] <vios> <device>|<physloc>
$

For all commands, devices can be specified either in the form of a device name, such as ent0 or fcs2, or as a physical location code (or a unique suffix of a physical location code), such as P1-C3-T1 or P1-C49.