Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition

Chapter 44. Devices

Quick Introduction to Hardware

Your Unix machine can likely talk to a wide collection of hardware: disk controllers and disks (Section 44.4, Section 44.5), CD-ROMs (Section 44.6), ethernet cards (Section 44.8), modems (Section 44.10), sound cards (Section 44.13), and so on. Each device needs its own little piece of software within the kernel, called a device driver. Some device drivers are simple, and some are very complex; some cover multiple devices, and some are specific to one particular piece of hardware.

Many modern Unix platforms use loadable kernel modules for most device drivers, so that drivers can be loaded at run time rather than compiled into the kernel.

Many devices also have user-space tools to configure them, like ifconfig (Section 44.8) for network devices (Section 44.6, Section 44.7), mount (Section 44.9) for disks and so forth.

In this chapter we’ll give you the whirlwind overview of devices on Unix. Since there are so many devices and so many platforms, we’ll gloss over a lot of details, but hopefully this will give you enough to get started with and a few hints as to where to find more information.

— DJPH

Reading Kernel Boot Output

As your Unix machine boots up, it will display a message for each device driver as it initializes. This is a good way to tell what devices your kernel was able to find. The exact output varies, but here is the output for hard drive controllers, hard drives, and network cards from a FreeBSD machine and ...