3.9 Devices and Device Nodes

A device is a term used mostly for hardware-related activities in a system, including disks, printers, graphics cards, and keyboards. When MicroBSD boots, the majority of what MicroBSD displays are devices being detected. You can look through the boot messages again by viewing /var/run/dmesg.boot or type:

# dmesg |more

For example, wd0 is the first IDE Hard Drive, while rl0 represents the network card.

Most of these devices in a Unix operating system must be accessed through special files called device nodes, which are located in the /dev directory.

3.9.1 Creating Device Nodes

When adding a new device to your system, or compiling in support for additional devices, you may need to create one or more device nodes for the new devices.

3.9.1.1 MAKEDEV Script

On systems without DEVFS, device nodes are created using the MAKEDEV script as shown below:

    # cd /dev
    # sh MAKEDEV wd1

This example would make the proper device nodes for the second IDE Hard Drive when installed.

This, and other documents, can be downloaded from MicroBSD.

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