Devices Flashcards
The ________ enables user-space programs to automatically configure and use new devices.
udev system
Why is it easy to manipulate most devices on a Unix system?
Because the kernel presents many of the device I/O interfaces to user processes as files.
What are device files sometimes called?
device nodes
What device causes the kernel to throw away the data stored there?
/dev/null
What four characters in the first position of the permission bits denote devices?
b
c
p
s
b
block
c
character
p
pipe
s
socket
A disk device is a type of _________.
block device
Character devices work with _____.
data streams
You can only ______ or ______ character devices, as previously demonstrated with /dev/null.
read characters from
write characters to
Named pipes are like character device, with ______ instead of _____.
another process at the other end of the I/O stream
a kernel driver.
What are sockets?
Sockets are special-purpose interfaces that are frequently used for interprocess comunication.
The program dd is extremely useful when working with _________.
block and character devices.
What is dd’s sole function?
to read from an input file or stream and write to an output file or stream, possibly doing some encoding conversion on the way.
Most hard disks attached to current Linux systems correspond to device names with an __ prefix, such as ___ and ____.
sd
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
sd prefixed devices represent entire disks, the kernel makes separate device files, such as ______ and ______ for the partitions on a disk.
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
What does the sd portion of a hard disk name stand for?
SCSi disk
What does SCSi stand for?
Small Computer System Interface
What is Small Computer System Interface?
It was originally developed as a hardware and protocol standard for communication between devices such as disks and other peripherals. The SCSI protocol (although not the hardware) is every due to its adaptability.
