From the course: Linux Device Drivers: Reading, Writing, and Debugging

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Look at the role of network device drivers

Look at the role of network device drivers - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Device Drivers: Reading, Writing, and Debugging

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Look at the role of network device drivers

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- [Instructor] Now, we get to talk about network devices and network device drivers. What is a network device? How do you interact with one? And interrupts are especially interesting for network devices, because network devices can have a lot of interrupts. So network devices do not have device files, just character and block. The network device is going to get requests from the kernel and the outside world, right? So from the kernel, because something want to do a transmit, and from the outside world, because some packet arrived. Plus, there's some other operations for tools to ask the driver things or set configurations, so forth. When you're doing ordinary network I/O, like from an application and you're using IP address, it's up to the kernel to choose which device based on how your system is set up for routing. So it's not that an application typically chooses the device directly when you're just doing socket I/O stuff. So there are a number of commands, way more than this…

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