Differences between current version and revision by previous author of DeviceDriver.
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| Newer page: | version 3 | Last edited on Friday, September 23, 2005 4:02:57 pm | by IanMcDonald | |
| Older page: | version 2 | Last edited on Saturday, October 25, 2003 9:25:15 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
-A small piece of [Software] that lets the OperatingSystem commune
with a specific piece of [Hardware].
+A small piece of [Software] that lets the OperatingSystem communicate
with a specific piece of [Hardware].
-[DeviceDriver]s have caused considerable soul-searching in the OpenSource world as they are the lowest level, most platform dependent pieces of software in many systems and many [Hardware] makers only provide [Binary] [DeviceDriver] for their [Hardware] in order to avoid giving the competition insights into how the hardware works.
+[DeviceDriver]s have caused considerable soul-searching in the OpenSource world as they are the lowest level, most platform dependent pieces of software in many systems and many [Hardware] makers only provide [Binary] [DeviceDriver]s
for their [Hardware] in order to avoid giving the competition insights into how the hardware works.
+
+[DeviceDriver]s are represented in the FileSystem under <tt>/dev</tt>. They get put here by mknod(1), DevFs or [UDev]. The current preferred method is [UDev].
+
+A DeviceDriver is either for a BlockDevice or a CharacterDevice and has a major and a minor device number. The device numbers are preassigned and listed in the LinuxKernel source in <tt>Documentation/devices.txt</tt>
