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STANDARD Printed by: Nora Chuang [nchuang] STANDARD

/build/1111/BRICK/man7/!!!intro.7

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clone(7) clone(7)

NAME

clone - opens a major and minor device pair on a STREAMS driver

DESCRIPTION

The clone driver is a "pass through" device driver that allows other drivers to select unique minor device

numbers on each open(). In effect, the driver passes an open operation through to the other driver. This

mechanism allows for multiple instantiations of a driver, each with a different minor number, through a

single device ﬁle.

When the clone driver is opened, it is passed a major and minor device number by the operating system.

The major number is the clone driver’s major number (72), and the minor number is the major number of

the driver the user wishes to clone (referred to here as the target driver). The clone driver calls the open

routine of the target driver with the CLONEOPEN ﬂag which speciﬁes a clone open. The target driver’s

open routine allocates an unused minor number. The target driver must use makedev to make a new

device number for the newly created device, and must set *devp to the new device number returned by

makedev. The new device number is returned to the clone open through *devp. The clone open

then returns to the user a ﬁle descriptor that points to the new instantiation of the target driver.

The echo driver is an example of a clonable driver.

Notes

It is not possible to do multiple opens of a device with the same major and minor number using the

clone

driver. This is because the clone driver is only given the major number of the driver to be cloned, and

that driver will then select a minor number which has not been opened.

When called with a pathname which corresponds to the clonable driver, stat() will return different

results than fstat() when it is called on a ﬁle descriptor returned from open() of the same clonable

driver pathname.

RETURN VALUES

If the

clone driver is given an invalid minor number, or if the driver indicated is not a clonable driver, the

open() fails and errno is set to [ENXIO].