Section 4: special files
mga – Matrox video driver Synopsis Section "Device" Identifier "devname" Driver "mga" … EndSection Description mga is an Xorg driver for Matrox video cards. The driver is fully accelerated, and provides support for the following framebuffer depths: 8, 15, 16, 24, and an 8+24 overlay mode. All visual types are supported for depth 8, and…
mem, kmem, port – system memory, kernel memory and system ports Description /dev/mem is a character device file that is an image of the main memory of the computer. It may be used, for example, to examine (and even patch) the system. Byte addresses in /dev/mem are interpreted as physical memory addresses. References to nonexistent…
md – Multiple Device driver aka Linux Software RAID Synopsis /dev/mdn /dev/md/n /dev/md/name Description The md driver provides virtual devices that are created from one or more independent underlying devices. This array of devices often contains redundancy and the devices are often disk drives, hence the acronym RAID which stands for a Redundant Array of…
mailcap – metamail capabilities file Description The mailcap file is read by the metamail program to determine how to display non-text at the local site. The syntax of a mailcap file is quite simple, at least compared to termcap files. Any line that starts with "#" is a comment. Blank lines are ignored. Otherwise, each…
lp – line printer devices Synopsis #include <linux/lp.h> Configuration lp[0-2] are character devices for the parallel line printers; they have major number 6 and minor number 0-2. The minor numbers correspond to the printer port base addresses 0x03bc, 0x0378, and 0x0278. Usually they have mode 220 and are owned by user root and group lp….
loop, loop-control – loop devices Synopsis #include <linux/loop.h> Description The loop device is a block device that maps its data blocks not to a physical device such as a hard disk or optical disk drive, but to the blocks of a regular file in a filesystem or to another block device. This can be useful…
loop, loop-control – loop devices Synopsis #include <linux/loop.h> Description The loop device is a block device that maps its data blocks not to a physical device such as a hard disk or optical disk drive, but to the blocks of a regular file in a filesystem or to another block device. This can be useful…
lirc – lirc devices Description The /dev/lirc* character devices provide a low-level bidirectional interface to infra-red (IR) remotes. Most of these devices can receive, and some can send. When receiving or sending data, the driver works in two different modes depending on the underlying hardware. Some hardware (typically TV-cards) decodes the IR signal internally and…
libinput – libinput-based X.Org input driver Synopsis Section "InputDevice" Identifier "devname" Driver "libinput" Option "Device" "devpath" … EndSection Note This is the man page for the X input driver. If you are looking for the library documentation, go to http://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/ Description libinput is an Xorg input driver based on libinput. It therefore supports all input…
mem, kmem, port – system memory, kernel memory and system ports Description /dev/mem is a character device file that is an image of the main memory of the computer. It may be used, for example, to examine (and even patch) the system. Byte addresses in /dev/mem are interpreted as physical memory addresses. References to nonexistent…
kbd – Keyboard input driver Synopsis Section "InputDevice" Identifier "idevname" Driver "kbd" … EndSection Description kbd is an Xorg input driver for keyboards. The driver supports the standard OS-provided keyboard interface, but these are currently only available to this driver module for Linux, BSD, and Solaris. This driver is the replacement for the built-in keyboard…
isdninfo – ISDN status device Synopsis #include <linux/isdn.h> Description /dev/isdninfo is a character device with major number 45 and minor number 255. It delivers status information from the Linux ISDN subsystem to user level. Data Format When reading from this device, the current status of the Linux ISDN subsystem is delivered in 6 lines of…
isdnctrl – ISDN control device Synopsis #include <linux/isdn.h> Description /dev/isdnctrl is a character device with major number 45 and minor numbers 64 to 127. It allows controlling functionality of the Linux ISDN subsystem. Ioctl Functions Currently, the following ioctl calls are supported: IIOCNETAIF Add an ISDN network interface. This function adds a network interface to…
isdn_audio – audio extension of ttyI ISDN character devices Description This document describes the audio related extensions of the modem emulation, provided by /dev/ttyIx. The ISDN tty devices are equipped with a modem emulation implementing a set of traditional and some special AT commands. This provides easy use together with almost all communication software that…
irnet – IrNET protocol device Description File /dev/irnet is used to access and configure the IrNET protocol part of the Linux-IrDA stack. IrNET is a protocol allowing to create TCP/IP connections between two IrDA peers in an efficient fashion, and generally to enable standard networking over IrDA. It is a thin layer, passing PPP packets…
intro – introduction to special files Description Section 4 of the manual describes special files (devices). Files /dev/* — device files Notes Authors and copyright conditions Look at the header of the manual page source for the author(s) and copyright conditions. Note that these can be different from page to page! See Also mknod(1), mknod(2),…
intel – Intel integrated graphics chipsets Synopsis Section "Device" Identifier "devname" Driver "intel" … EndSection Description intel is an Xorg driver for Intel integrated graphics chipsets. The driver supports depths 8, 15, 16 and 24. All visual types are supported in depth 8. For the i810/i815 other depths support the TrueColor and DirectColor visuals. For…
intel-virtual-output – Utility for connecting the Integrated Intel GPU to discrete outputs Synopsis intel-virtual-output [<remote display>] <output name>… Description intel-virtual-output is a utility for Intel integrated graphics chipsets on hybrid systems. The tool connects local VirtualHeads to a remote output, allowing the primary display to extend onto the remote outputs. Reporting Bugs The xf86-video-intel driver…
inputtest – An X.Org input driver for testing Synopsis Section "InputDevice" Identifier "devname" Driver "inputtest" Option "SocketPath" "path" … EndSection Description inputtest is an Xorg input driver that passes events received over a socket on to the server as input events. It supports the full set of the xf86 driver APIs exposed by Xorg. The…
initrd – boot loader initialized RAM disk Configuration /dev/initrd is a read-only block device assigned major number 1 and minor number 250. Typically /dev/initrd is owned by root:disk with mode 0400 (read access by root only). If the Linux system does not have /dev/initrd already created, it can be created with the following commands: mknod…