The basic data structure for a given device, built by Configuration Manager; sometimes called devnode. Device nodes are built into memory at system startup for each device and enumerator with information about the device, such as currently assigned resources. The complete representation of all device nodes is referred to as the hardware tree.
a node in the device tree.
A device node, device file, or device special file is a type of special file used on many Unix-like operating systems. Device nodes facilitate transparent communication between user space applications and computer hardware. There also exist special device files on DOS variants, most notably MS-DOS.