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Devices are files on UNIX, as we all know from its design.

It was more due to lack of userspace APIs for graphics programming than anything else.



Minor nitpick from someone who wrote device drivers at a FAANG whose name starts with A and who is not based in Seattle: devices can have a presence as a device special file in the filesystem, but they might be not represented in the filesystem also...they might be hiding down some hardware bus, for example.


Depends on which UNIX.


Eh you also need to call iopl() which is a privileged operation, it's not just about file permissions


It is a Linux specific API.




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