NAME

intro − introduction to special files and hardware support

DESCRIPTION

This section describes device interfaces (drivers) in the operating system for disks, tapes, serial communications, high-speed network communications, and other devices such as mice, frame buffers and windows.  The section is divided into a few subsections: Sun-specific drivers are grouped in “4S”; protocol families in “4F”; protocols and raw interfaces are treated in “4P”; and network interfaces in “4N”. 

The operating system can be built with or without many of the drivers listed here.  For most of them, the SYNOPSIS section of the manual page gives the syntax of the line to include in a kernel configuration file if you wish to include the driver in a system.  See config(8) for a description of this process. The pages for most drivers also include a DIAGNOSTICS section listing error messages the driver may produce.  These messages appear on the system console, and also in the system error log file /usr/adm/messages.

Drivers which are present in every kernel include a driver for the paging device, drum(4); drivers for accessing physical, virtual, and I/O space, mem(4S); and drivers for the data sink, 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 mti(4S) or zs(4S) or by a virtual terminal. The virtual terminal may be provided either by the Sun console monitor, cons(4S), or by 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), tm(4S), st(4S), and xt(4S).

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

The operating system supports one or more protocol families for local network communications.  The only complete protocol family in this version of the system is the Internet protocol family; see inet(4F). Each protocol family provides basic services — packet fragmentation and reassembly, routing, addressing, and basic transport — to each protocol implementation. A protocol family is normally composed of a number of protocols, one per socket(2) type.  A protocol family is not required to 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 Transmission 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; see ec(4S) and ie(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 color frame buffers cg∗(4S), monochrome frame buffers bw∗(4S), the console frame buffer fb(4S), the console mouse mouse(4S), and the window devices win(4S).

Sun Release 2.0  —  Last change: 28 February 1985