devfsd is a device manager for the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. Primarily, it creates device nodes in the directory when kernel drivers make the underlying hardware accessible. The nodes exist in a virtual

device file In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These s ...

system named

devfs In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These spec ...

. In systems that support many different types of hardware, each of which has its own device nodes, this is more convenient than creating all possible device nodes beforehand and in a real filesystem. While devfs was a step forward, it had several disadvantages of its own. Since version 2.5 of the Linux kernel, devfs has been succeeded by

udev udev (userspace ) is a device manager for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices ...

and devtmpfs.

References

External links

* {{Linux kernel Computer configuration Linux file system-related software Linux kernel-related software Unix file system-related software

See also

References

External links