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Devices & Drivers

How the kernel discovers hardware, binds drivers to it, and exposes the big device classes — buses, peripherals, and the frameworks that make them look uniform to user space.

  • Drivers (drivers/) — the device model and how drivers bind to hardware (buses, PCI, device tree, platform, I2C/SPI)
  • USB (usb/) — the host-scheduled, hot-pluggable peripheral bus: descriptors, endpoints, and URBs
  • GPU / DRM (drm/) — the graphics and display stack: KMS modesetting, GEM buffers, and command submission
  • Audio / ALSA (alsa/) — the sound subsystem: the card/PCM/control object model, the ring-buffer data path, and ASoC for embedded audio
  • Input / HID (input/) — the input core, evdev, and the self-describing HID report-descriptor protocol
  • TTY / Serial (tty/) — the teletypewriter-derived terminal model: line disciplines, serial core/UART drivers, and pseudo-terminals