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If a Stream supports a terminal interface, a driver or module that understands all ioctls to support terminal semantics (specified by termio and termios) is needed. If there is no hardware driver that understands all ioctl commands downstream from the ldterm module, a hardware emulation module must be placed downstream from the ldterm module. The function of the hardware emulation module is to understand and acknowledge the ioctls that may be sent to the process at the Stream head and to mediate the passage of control information downstream. The combination of the ldterm module and the hardware emulation module behaves as if there were a terminal on that Stream.
The hardware emulation module is necessary whenever there is no tty driver at the end of the Stream. For example, it is necessary in a pseudo-tty situation where there is process-to-process communication on one system and in a network situation where a termio interface is expected (for example, remote login) but there is no tty driver on the Stream.
Most actions taken by the hardware emulation module are the same regardless of the underlying architecture. However, some actions differ depending on whether the communication is local or remote and whether the underlying transport protocol supports the remote connection.
Each hardware emulation module has an open, close, read queue put procedure, and write queue put procedure.
The hardware emulation module does the following:
The hardware emulation module processes messages in a way consistent with the driver that exists below.