INTRO(4) MachTen Programmer’s Manual INTRO(4)

NAME
intro - introduction to special files and hardware support

DESCRIPTION
This section describes the special files, related driver functions, and
networking support available in the system. In this part of the manual,
the SYNOPSIS section of each configurable device gives a sample specifi-
cation for use in constructing a system description for the config(8)
program. The DIAGNOSTICS section lists messages which may appear on the
console and/or in the system error log /usr/adm/messages due to errors in
device operation; see syslogd(8) for more information.

This section contains both devices which may be configured into the sys-
tem and network related information. The networking support is intro-
duced in netintro(4).

MACHTEN DEVICE SUPPORT
This section describes the hardware supported on the MACHTEN Macintosh
CPUs. Software support for these devices comes in two forms. A hardware
device may be supported with a character or block device driver, or it
may be used within the networking subsystem and have a network interface
driver. Block and character devices are accessed through files in the
file system of a special type; see mknod(8). Network interfaces are in-
directly accessed through the interprocess communication facilities pro-
vided by the system; see socket(2).

A hardware device are probed at MachTen initialization time, and are re-
ported via kernel printfs in the first few lines of MachTen startup in-
formation.