In reply to Padraig Brady's flatulent wordings,
> I was wondering about this myself lately.
>> It think it's cos they can push data to you at any
> time. "Ordinary" devices must be proactively opened
> and read()/write() done, whereas data can arrive
> at a network interface at any time, and it's not
> necessarily destined for a particular process. I.E.
> the kernel must respond to pings etc. independent
> of any process. It must also mux data from one
> interface to many processes. To me a socket() is
> associated with a process and is on the same level
> as a device in /dev, and in fact is in the filesystem
> in /proc/$$/fd
The Tun device on *BSDs (which is used by FreeBSD ppp) does all of the above.
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