A couple weeks ago we encountered the "sp diff" message below on bootup. The message iterated about 15-20 times before continuing the final bootup sequence, which took at least twice as long as normal.
A colleague of mine recalled performing some multipathing activities a few days earlier and thought there might be some dangling dev links as a result.
To resolve the issue, the devfsadm command was executed in cleanup mode, -C.
sp diff: name finddevice, nargs 1, nret 1,sp 0xf05d35b8 osp 0xf05d35a8
sp diff: name finddevice, nargs 1, nret 1,sp 0xf05d35b8 osp 0xf05d35a8
sp diff: name finddevice, nargs 1, nret 1,sp 0xf05d35b8 osp 0xf05d35a8
sp diff: name finddevice, nargs 1, nret 1,sp 0xf05d35b8 osp 0xf05d35a8
sp diff: name finddevice, nargs 1, nret 1,sp 0xf05d35b8 osp 0xf05d35a8
...
# devfsadm -C -v
# init 6
Update: A message from a colleague who requested not to be named.
stmsboot -e will enable multipathing, the system needs to be rebooted in order for it to take effect.
When the system comes up, you will notice long device names in
/dev/dsk/. It may be coincidence but I noticed that the number of
multipathing devices listed match the number of sp diff lines that are
displayed.
Next, I did a stmsboot -d to disable multipathing and rebooted the
system. When the system came back online, I still saw the sp diff lines.
Lastly, I did the devfsadm -C -v and I saw it clean up the device links. I rebooted the system again and the sp diff lines were gone.
You would think that disabling multipathing should delete the links but
it doesn't.