At some point in the past, Unix — the progenitor of Linux — treated virtually everything as a file, and all files were created more or less equal. Programs didn’t care if a file was local, on the ...

In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic analyzer. Today, you can get cheap logic ...

In the last two installments of Driving Me Nuts [LJ August 2002 and October 2002], we covered the tty layer, explaining how to create a minimal tty driver. We also explained some of the various ioctls ...