A/UX® System Administrator's Reference Sections 1M, 7, and 8

intro(7) intro(7)
NAME
intro - introduction to device drivers and interfaces
DESCRIPTION
The entries in this section provide useful information for users and
programmers, although programmers may be able to benefit more.
Users need to know what device files are typically associated with
which devices or ports so that the commands that accept device
files as arguments can be specified accurately. For example,
/dev/ttyO and /dev/ttyl refer to serial ports, and
/dev/dsk/eOdOsO through /dev/dsk/e7dOsO refer to
slice 0 of each of the hard disks set to SCSI ID 0 through 7.
To rebuild or make custom-named device files, users need to
know what major device numbers correspond to particular device
drivers, as well as the operational or addressing modes selected by
the minor device numbers associated with a particular device
driver. Note that the NUX autoconfiguration utilities automatically
create and remove device files (with default filenames)
whenever necessary for a particular device configuration they are
establishing (see autoeonfig(IM), neweonfig(IM), and
newunix(IM)).
This section also includes information helpful to readers who wish
to manipulate a device directly through its corresponding interface.
For example, you can format a cartridge tape through the
general rot device interface to tape devices. These device-level
interfaces allow access to device-specific functions, such as cartridge
tape formatting, that would not normally be available as a
standard operation for all tape devices. Non-universal operations
typically would not be available through the flag options for the
standard programs, such as tar and epio, described in Section 1
of A/UX Command Reference.
Programmers who wish to write programs that can access all the
peculiarities of specific devices may find the standard I/O library
lacking the necessary capabilities. If you need to know this information,
Section 7 describes the special system calls, or ioctls, associated
with particular device drivers.
The device files identified with the letter "P" following the section
number are part of the NUX POSIX environment. The
differences between the NUX environment and the A/UX POSIX
environment are described in A/UX Guide to POSIX, which is provided
in A/UX Programming Languages and Tools, Volume 1.
February, 1990
Revision C
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