6. Devices

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LINUX, LIKE MOST OPERATING SYSTEMS, INTERACTS WITH HARDWARE devices via modularized software components called device drivers . A device driver hides the peculiarities of a hardware device’s communication protocols from the operating system and allows the system to interact with the device through a standardized interface.

Under Linux, device drivers are part of the kernel and may be either linked statically into the kernel or loaded on demand as kernel modules. Device drivers run as part of the kernel and aren’t directly accessible to user processes. However, Linux provides a mechanism by which processes can communicate with ...

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