A device is a term used mostly for hardware-related
activities in a system, including disks, printers, graphics
cards, and keyboards. When FreeBSD boots, the majority of the boot
messages refer to devices being detected. A copy of the boot
messages are saved to
/var/run/dmesg.boot.
Each device has a device name and number. For example,
acd0 is the first IDE CD-ROM drive,
while kbd0 represents the
keyboard.
Most devices in a FreeBSD must be accessed through special
files called device nodes, which are located in
/dev.
When adding a new device to your system, or compiling in support for additional devices, new device nodes must be created.
The device file system, DEVFS,
provides access to the kernel's device namespace in the
global file system namespace. Instead of having to
manually create and modify device nodes,
DEVFS automatically maintains this
particular file system. Refer to devfs(5) for
more information.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.