These are things that act like hardware, but have no actual hardware attached. Most are found on all architectures. If a number appears after a pseudo-device driver, that is the total number of the particular pseudo-device driver the system will support.
pseudo-device | vnd | 4 |
This is a disk-like interface to files, for a variety of filesystem tricks. See Chapter 15.
pseudo-device | ccd | 4 |
This allows you to combine multiple disks into one large concatenated disk. See ccd(4).
pseudo-device | raid | 4 |
This is the RAIDframe software RAID system. See raid(4).
These pseudo-devices provide different methods of accessing the network.
pseudo-device | pf | 1 |
This is OpenBSD's integrated packet filter, and is discussed in Chapters 17 through 19.
pseudo-device | pflog | 1 |
This device lets pf log what it does, and is also discussed in Chapters 17 through 19.
pseudo-device | loop | 2 |
This is the loopback device. If you remove it, many programs will break in an entertaining way. See lo(4) for details.
pseudo-device | bpfilter | 8 |
This supports the Berkeley Packet Filter, the standard packet sniffer.
pseudo-device | sl | 2 |
This supports SLIP, the popular pre-PPP dialup protocol.
pseudo-device | ppp | 2 |
This lets you connect to the Internet with dialup connections using pppd(8). I recommend using user-mode ppp, which requires tun devices instead of this. See Chapter 9.
pseudo-device | sppp | 1 |
This supports Synchronous PPP. Most people have no need of it, but see sppp(4) if you're curious.
pseudo-device | tun | 2 |
This is a tunneling network device, used by user-mode ppp and a variety of VPN tools. We discuss using tun with ppp in Chapter 9.
pseudo-device | bridge | 2 |
man: brconfig(8)
Bridging is where two separate Ethernet segments are connected transparently.
pseudo-device | vlan | 2 |
This lets you divide a single Ethernet into two segments, or virtual lans. See vlan(4).
pseudo-device | gre | 1 |
This supports Cisco Generic Routing Encapsulation, a common VPN protocol. See gre(4).
pseudo-device | pty | 64 |
Pseudo-terminals are software terminals. Every remote shell connection needs a pseudo-terminal. See pty(4).
pseudo-device | tb | 1 |
This supports many popular serial digitizers. See tb(4).
pseudo-device | ksyms | 1 |
This lets a programmer pull symbol names from a running kernel. It's very useful for kernel developers; see ksyms(4).
While we're not covering IPv6 in this book, the following IPv6 devices are included in the GENERIC kernel and so should be mentioned.
pseudo-device | gif | 4 |
This is a generic IP tunnel, allowing you to tunnel either IPv4 or IPv6 over IPv4 or IPv6. See gif(4).
pseudo-device | faith | 1 |
This pseudo-device can capture IPv6 traffic and relay it to a userland program. See faith(4).
pseudo-device | enc | 1 |
The encapsulation interface allows the system to send IPv6 traffic through pf(4). See enc(4).
The following pseudo-devices really don't fit anywhere else.
pseudo-device | pctr | 1 |
This adds hooks for performance counters, discussed in pctr(1).
pseudo-device | mtrr | 1 |
This pseudo-device provides access to the memory range attributes supported on Pentium CPUs. See mtrr(4).
pseudo-device | sequencer | 1 |
This supports MIDI sequencers.
pseudo-device | wsmux | 2 |
This is a virtual multiplexor for the wscons virtual console framework.
pseudo-device | crypto | 1 |
This provides userland programs a generic interface to hardware cryptographic support through the kernel. See crypto(4).