1 .\" Copyright (c) 1998 Doug Rabson
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27 .\" $FreeBSD: src/share/man/man9/device.9,v 1.7.2.4 2001/08/17 13:08:54 ru Exp $
28 .\" $DragonFly: src/share/man/man9/device.9,v 1.4 2004/06/01 11:36:53 hmp Exp $
35 .Nd an abstract representation of a device
37 .Vt typedef struct device *device_t ;
39 The device object represents a piece of hardware attached to the
40 system such as an expansion card, the bus which that card is plugged
41 into, disk drives attached to the expansion card etc.
42 The system defines one device,
44 and all other devices are created dynamically during
45 autoconfiguration. Normally devices representing toplevel busses in
46 the system (ISA, PCI etc.) will be attached directly to
48 and other devices will be added as children of their relevant bus.
50 The devices in a system form a tree.
54 .Xr device_get_parent 9 ) .
55 In addition, any device can have children attached to it (see
56 .Xr device_add_child 9 ,
57 .Xr device_add_child_ordered 9 ,
58 .Xr device_find_child 9 ,
59 .Xr device_get_children 9 ,
61 .Xr device_delete_child 9 ) .
63 A device which has been successfully probed and attached to the
64 system will also have a driver (see
65 .Xr device_get_driver 9
69 .Xr device_get_devclass 9
72 Various other attributes of the device include a unit number (see
73 .Xr device_get_unit 9 ) ,
74 verbose description (normally supplied by the driver, see
77 .Xr device_get_desc 9 ) ,
78 a set of bus-specific variables (see
79 .Xr device_get_ivars 9 )
80 and a set of driver-specific variables (see
81 .Xr device_get_softc 9 ) .
83 Devices can be in one of several states:
84 .Bl -tag -width DS_NOTPRESENT
86 the device has not been probed for existence or the probe failed
88 the device probe succeeded but not yet attached
90 the device has been successfully attached
92 the device is currently open
95 The current state of the device can be determined by calling
96 .Xr device_get_state 9 .
101 This man page was written by