Background on Device Files and Peripherals

HP-UX creates special files for most devices it finds attached at the time the system boots. You may, however, have to create your own device files or, at a minimum, have to understand some device files that exist on your system so the information in this chapter is important for every system administrator to know. It's important to know about the devices files for all of the components in your system especially on partition-based systems on which you're always viewing what devices are devoted to what partitions. I'll cover the following topics in this chapter:

• An overview of device files in HP-UX 11i.

• An example of adding a peripheral.

• Some examples of device files in nPartitions (hard partitions) on cell -based systems. These examples were taken directly from Chapter 17 so please see that chapter if you want more detail on device files in nPartitions.

The following section is a general overview of device files.