Device Inodes
=============

Device inodes are filesystem inodes that represent a device in the system.
They may be created from either a device, or by reconstituting a persistent device inode from a filesystem.

An example for device inodes created to directly represent devices are the entries in the devfs (/dev) filesystem.
Entries in this filesystem are generally created and removed based on devices appearing in and being removed from the system.

An example for device inodes reconstituted from persisted inodes can be found in the inodes supported by the ext2 filesystem.
In that filesystem, an inode may represent a device, using a device identification number.
When accessing such an inode, a device inode needs to be reconstituted from the persisted device inode in order to resolve which device, if any, it refers to.
However, any file operations (e.g. `stat`) need to be forwarded to the persisted inode.

API Reference
-------------

.. doxygenstruct:: kernel::filesystem::device_inode
    :members: