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MAKEDEV(8) Linux Programmer’s Manual MAKEDEV(8)
NAME
MAKEDEV - create devices
SYNOPSIS
/sbin/MAKEDEV -V
/sbin/MAKEDEV [ -d directory ] [ -D directory ] [ -c configdir ] [ -m maxdevices ]
[-a] [-n] [-v] [-i] [-M] [-S] [-u] [-x] device ...
DESCRIPTION
MAKEDEV is a program that will create the devices in /dev used to interface with
drivers in the kernel.
Note that programs giving the error ‘‘ENOENT: No such file or directory’’ normally
means that the device file is missing, whereas ‘‘ENODEV: No such device’’ normally
means the kernel does not have the driver configured or loaded.
OPTIONS
-V Print out version and exit.
-a Always create devices, even if they already exist and have the proper per-
missions and file context. The default behavior is to only (re-)create
device nodes which appear to be missing or whose permissions differ from the
configured values.
-m maxdevices
Create no more than the specified number of devices for any specification in
a configuration file.
-n Do not actually update the devices, just print the actions that would be
performed.
-M Create symlinks, directories, and sockets belonging to the current user, and
print out the list of devices which would be created in a format which is
understood by RPM.
-S Do not actually update the devices, just print the actions that would be
performed in a format which can be fed to a shell.
-d directory
Create the devices under directory instead of the default (usually /dev).
-D directory
Compute file contexts for device creation as if the directory specified for
the -d flag were the specified directory. This is useful if the -d flag is
being used to populate a chrooted device directory.
-u Print the ownership and permissions for devices instead of creating them.
The information is formatted for use by udev.
-x Create exactly the named device. By default, device names which have the
specified device name as the initial portion of their name are also created.
For example, specifying "tty" will also trigger the creation of "tty1",
"tty2", and so on.
-v Be verbose. Print out the actions as they are performed. This is the same
output as produced by the -n option.
-i Ignore errors parsing configuration files.
CUSTOMIZATION
Since there is currently no standardization in what names are used for system users
and groups, it is possible that you may need to modify MAKEDEV’s configuration
files to reflect your site’s settings.
DEVICES
Certain devices are required for minimal functionality. These are:
mem - access to physical memory; null - null device (infinite sink); port -
access to I/O ports; zero - null byte source (infinite source); core - sym-
link to /proc/kcore (for kernel debugging); full - always returns ENOSPACE
on write; ram - ramdisk; tty - to access the controlling tty of a process.
Virtual Terminals
console
This creates the devices associated with the console. These are the virtual
terminals ttyx, where x can be from 0 though 63. The device tty0 is the
currently active VT, and is also known as console. For each VT, there are
two devices: vcsx and vcsax, which can be used to generate screen-dumps of
the VT (vcsx is just the text, and vcsax includes the attributes).
Serial Devices
ttyS{0..63}
Serial ports.
Pseudo Terminals
pty[p-s]
Each possible argument will create a bank of 16 master and slave pairs. The
current kernel (1.2) is limited to 64 such pairs. The master pseudo-termi-
nals are pty[p-s][0-9a-f], and the slaves are tty[p-s][0-9a-f].
Parallel Ports
lp Standard parallel ports. The devices are created lp0, lp1, and lp2.
Bus Mice
busmice
The various bus mice devices. This creates the following devices: logimouse
(Logitech bus mouse), psmouse (PS/2-style mouse), msmouse (Microsoft Inport
bus mouse) and atimouse (ATI XL bus mouse) and jmouse (J-mouse).
Joystick Devices
js Joystick. Creates js0 and js1.
Disk Devices
fd[0-7]
Floppy disk devices. The device fdx is the device which autodetects the
format, and the additional devices are fixed format (whose size is indicated
in the name). The other devices are named as fdxLn. The single letter L
identifies the type of floppy disk (d = 5.25" DD, h = 5.25" HD, D = 3.5" DD,
H = 3.5" HD, E = 3.5" ED). The number n represents the capacity of that
format in K. Thus the standard formats are fdxd360, fdxh1200, fdxD720,
fdxH1440, and fdxE2880.
For more information see Alain Knaff’s fdutils package.
Devices fd0* through fd3* are floppy disks on the first controller, and
devices fd4* through fd7* are floppy disks on the second controller.
hd[a-d]
AT hard disks. The device hdx provides access to the whole disk, with the
partitions being hdx[0-20]. The four primary partitions are hdx1 through
hdx4, with the logical partitions being numbered from hdx5 though hdx20. (A
primary partition can be made into an extended partition, which can hold 4
logical partitions). By default, only the devices for 4 logical partitions
are made. The others can be made by uncommenting them.
Drives hda and hdb are the two on the first controller. If using the new
IDE driver (rather than the old HD driver), then hdc and hdd are the two
drives on the secondary controller. These devices can also be used to acess
IDE CDROMs if using the new IDE driver.
xd[a-d]
XT hard disks. Partitions are the same as IDE disks.
sd[a-z], sd[a-c][a-z], sdd[a-x]
SCSI hard disks. The partitions are similar to the IDE disks, but there is
a limit of 11 logical partitions (sdx5 through sdx15). This is to allow
there to be 128 SCSI disks.
loop Loopback disk devices. These allow you to use a regular file as a block
device. This means that images of filesystems can be mounted, and used as
normal. This creates 16 devices loop0 through loop15.
Tape Devices
st[0-7]
SCSI tapes. This creates the rewinding tape device stx and the non-rewind-
ing tape device nstx.
qic QIC-80 tapes. The devices created are rmt8, rmt16, tape-d, and tape-reset.
ftape Floppy driver tapes (QIC-117). There are 4 methods of access depending on
the floppy tape drive. For each of access methods 0, 1, 2 and 3, the
devices rftx (rewinding) and nrftx (non-rewinding) are created. For com-
patability, devices ftape and nftape are symlinks to rft0 and nrft0 respec-
tively.
CDROM Devices
scd[0-7]
SCSI CD players.
sonycd Sony CDU-31A CD player.
mcd Mitsumi CD player.
cdu535 Sony CDU-535 CD player.
lmscd LMS/Philips CD player.
sbpcd{,1,2,3}
Sound Blaster CD player. The kernel is capable of supporting 16 CDROMs,
each of which is accessed as sbpcd[0-9a-f]. These are assigned in groups of
4 to each controller. sbpcd is a symlink to sbpcd0.
Scanner
logiscan
Logitech ScanMan32 & ScanMan 256.
m105scan
Mustek M105 Handscanner.
ac4096 A4Tek Color Handscanner.
Audio
sound This creates the audio devices used by the sound driver. These include
mixer, sequencer, dsp, and audio.
Miscellaneous
sg Generic SCSI devices. The devices created are sga through sgh and sg0
through sg7. These allow arbitary commands to be sent to any SCSI device.
This allows for querying information about the device, or controlling SCSI
devices that are not one of disk, tape or CDROM (e.g. scanner, CD-R, CD-RW).
fd To allow an arbitary program to be fed input from file descriptor x, use
/dev/fd/x as the file name. This also creates /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and
/dev/stderr. (Note, these are just symlinks into /proc/self/fd).
ibcs2 Devices (and symlinks) needed by the IBCS2 emulation.
apm Devices for power management.
Network Devices
Linux used to have devices in /dev for controlling network devices, but that
is no longer the case. To see what network devices are known by the kernel,
look in /proc/net/dev.
Other Devices
Note that the list of devices above is not exhaustive. MAKEDEV can create
more devices nodes. Its aim is to be able to create everything listed in
the devices.txt file distributed with Linux 2.4.
CONFIGURATION
MAKEDEV doesn’t actually know anything about devices. It reads all of the informa-
tion from files stored in /etc/makedev.d. MAKEDEV will read any and all files in
the subdirectory, skipping over subdirectories, symbolic links, and device nodes,
processing lines in the files like so:
devices
[b|c] mode owner group major minor inc count fmt [base]
count devices will be created, with permissions set to mode and owned by
owner and group. The first device will be named fmt, and additional devices
will be created if count is larger than 1. If fmt contains a C-style for-
matting string, it will be filled with the sum of base and zero. Subsequent
devices will be filled with the sum of base and n * inc, where n is the
order this device is being created in. If the format string did not already
include a format specifier, a "%d" will automatically be appended to it to
make this work.
symbolic links
l linkname target
A symbolic link pointing to target named linkname will be created.
aliases
a alias value
Any commands that create devices for alias will also include devices that
would be crated for value.
SEE ALSO
Linux Allocated Devices, maintained by Torben Mathiasen <device AT lanana.org>.
BUGS
Let’s hope not. If we’re lucky, any problems we’ll find will be confined to the
configuration files, which were written by examining the devices.txt file. If your
system uses udev, conflicts between devices.txt and the in-kernel data which udev
uses for naming devices may crop up.
AUTHOR
Nalin Dahyabhai, based largely on work done by Nick Holloway and Michael K. John-
son.
Linux 26 June 2001 MAKEDEV(8)
Generated by $Id: phpMan.php,v 4.55 2007/09/05 04:42:51 chedong Exp $ Author: Che Dong
On Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) PHP/5.2.5 mod_perl/1.30 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a
Under GNU General Public License
2008-08-21 14:03 @38.103.63.61 CrawledBy CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)