Kernel Modules
We saw at the beginning of the chapter that the kernel deals with all hardware communication and it does this by the means of system calls. But how does the kernel know how to talk to so many different hardware devices, and what happens when a new device that it doesn't know about is added?
The answer is found in the heading of this section. Kernel modules provide the kernel with all the information it needs to be able to talk to a specific type of device. This information includes how to open and close the device, how to read from and write to it, and how to configure and control it. Because there are so many different devices available and only a fraction of them would ever be connected to any given Sun computer, the information ...
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