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On a linux system many device names can be seen under /dev. This must be defined somewhere in the linux kernel source code, the udev code, device trees or driver code.
For example, where is the source code located that determines a floppy drive should start with fd or that a hard disk starts with sd ?
An easier one to find might be something like /dev/null or /dev/zero. For those, take a look at ${kernel_root}/drivers/char/mem.c. For 4.9.6 (and it's probably been this way for a while now), there's an array of struct memdev named devlist, where each entry in the array corresponds to a memory device:
...
[3] = { "null", 0666, &null_fops, 0 },
...
[5] = { "zero", 0666, &zero_fops, 0 },
...
The null_fops and zero_fops contain the file operation structures for the corresponding devices.
There's the LXR (Linux cross reference) project where you can select your kernel version and search the code.
(Note: The old http://lxr.linux.no doesn't work properly anymore, at least for me; search is broken for newer kernel versions.)
Searching for "floppy" (without quotes) and a couple of attempts peeking into the results grepping for "fd" (with quotes) led me to the implementation of the floppy block device (here in kernel 4.9):
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/block/floppy.c#L4219
Now being a crossreference you can follow register_blkdev to its other places of use.
