Linux device drivers...followup...

Kevin M. Gleason kgleason at ma.ultranet.com
Tue Feb 22 07:03:44 EST 2000


Hi all,
After Jerry's response I did a lookup of floppy drives in /dev directory and
obtained a list of those beginning with fd0 (and identical list was there for
fd1):
fd0
fd0D360
fd0D720
fd0H1440
fd0H360
fd0H720
fd0d360
fd0h1200
fd0h360
fd0h720
Can I assume that when the system starts up it looks in ROM Bios and matches up
my 1.44M floppy drive with its device driver fd0H1440 and uses its device info?
What do all of the other numbers stand for and why are there repeats (360
appears four times)? If these numbers reference disk capacity does the letter
preceeding it represent drive size (8", 5 1/4", 3 1/2")?
Thanks.

Kevin
---------------------------------------
Jerry Feldman wrote:

> First, the files in the /dev/ directory are usually device special files and
> rarely are there normal files. When you do an ls -l, the first character
> before the permissions says whether it is a character or block device.
> In the following, ptyp0 is a character device with a major number of 7,
> and a minor number of 0.
> crw-rw-rw-   1 root     system     7,      0 Oct 22 14:48 ptyp0
> Each driver is identified by a major number, and the device is generally
> the minor number, but that actually depends on the driver. Floppy names
> are normally set up as something like /dev/fd01440. There is a whole
> bunch of them. I don't have a linux system that I can log into from here.
>
> On 21 Feb 00, at 10:22, Kevin M. Gleason wrote:
>
> > I was playing around on my Linux box and had some questions about files
> > in /dev.
> > If fd0 is used to define the first 3 1/2" high density floppy what other
> > device drivers might I expect to see for the same size drive?
> >
> > Or other drivers on my computer (I have used the cdrom is09660).
> >
> > Are there drivers for the old 5 1/4" floppy disk drives?
> >
> > Thanks for your help.
> >
> > Kevin
> >
> > -
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> --
> Jerry Feldman
> Contractor, eInfrastructure Partner Engineering
> 508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/
>
> Compaq Computer Corp.
> 200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1
> Marlboro, Ma. 01752
> -
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