RHCE: Red Hat Certified Engineer Study Guide - Directory UMM

Linux supports a remarkable variety of computer systems and
devices. Nevertheless, it doesn’t support them all. Even if Linux supports a
particular system or device, you must properly configure the device before
Linux can access it.
This chapter deals with Linux support of hardware. In the Unix world,
hardware devices are assigned to one of two categories:
Character Devices Character devices read or write data not more than
one character at a time.
Block Devices Block devices read or write data several—perhaps
many—characters at a time.
In the real world, these two categories sometimes overlap, but they’re a useful
way of organizing your thinking about devices.
This chapter begins by describing Linux support for systems. It then
moves on to describe Linux support for character devices, and wraps up by
describing Linux support for block devices.
Linux Support for Systems
Although Linux runs on a variety of platforms, Red Hat Linux currently
supports only the following three:
� Compaq (formerly DEC) Alpha architecture
� Intel architecture
� Sun SPARC (scalable processor architecture)