NAME

intro − introduction to special files and hardware support

DESCRIPTION

This section describes device interfaces to the operating system for disks, tapes, serial communications, high-speed network communications, and other devices such as mice, frame buffers and windows. 

The operating system can be built with or without many of the devices listed here; we show for most devices the syntax in a description to config(8) to cause the device to be included in a system. For mose devices we also give a DIAGNOSTICS section which lists the error messages which the device may produce to appear on the system console, and in the system error log file /usr/adm/messages.

Section 4 has been broken up according to machine independent device interfaces, “4” entries, Sun specific devices “4S”, Vax specific devices “4V”, manual pages for protocol families “4F”, and manual pages for protocols and raw interfaces “4P”. 

Most devices on the Sun workstation exist on the Multibus, whose common properties are described in mb(4S).

Devices which are present in every kernel include a driver for the paging drum drum(4), drivers for accessing physical, virtual and i/o memory mem(4S) and the drivers for the data sink /dev/null, null(4).

Communications lines are most often used with the terminal driver described in tty(4). The terminal driver runs on communications lines provided either by a communications driver such as oct(4S) or zs(4S) or on a more virtual terminal, either provided by the Sun console monitor cons(4S) or a true pseudo-terminal pty(4) used in applications such as windowing or remote networking.

Magnetic tapes all provide the interface described in mtio(4). Tape devices for the Sun include ar(4S) and tm(4S).

Disk controllers provide standard block and raw interfaces, as well as a set of ioctl’s defined in dkio(4S) supporting disk formatting and bad block handling. Drivers available for the Sun include xy(4S) and ip(4S).

The operating system supports one or more protocol families supporting local network communications.  The only complete protocol family in this version of the system is the Internet protocol family inet(4F). Each protocol family provides basic services to each protocol implementation such as packet fragmentation and reassembly, routing, addressing and basic transport. A protocol family is normally composed of a number of protocols, one per socket(2) type.  It is not required that a protocol family support all socket types.

The primary network support is for the Internet protocol family described in inet(4F). Major protocols in this family include the Internet Protocol ip(4P) describing the universal datagram format, the stream Transport Control Protocol tcp(4P), the User Datagram Protocol udp(4P), the Address Resolution Protocol arp(4P), and the Internet Control Message Protocol icmp(4P). The primary network interface is for the 10 Megabit Ethernet ec(4S); a software loopback interface lo(4) also exists. General properties of these (and all) network interfaces are described in if(4N).

The general support in the system for local network routing is described in routing(4N); these facilities apply to all protocol families.

Miscellaneous devices include the color frame buffer cg(4S), the mouse ms(4S) and the window devices win(4S).

Sun System Release 1.0  —  17 August 1983