raw is used to bind a Linux raw character device to a block device. Any
block device may be used: at the time of binding, the device driver does
not even have to be accessible (it may be loaded on demand as a kernel
module later).
raw is used in two modes: it either sets raw device bindings, or it queries
existing bindings. When setting a raw device,
/dev/raw/raw<N> is the device name of an existing raw device node in the filesystem.
The block device to which it is to be bound can be specified either in
terms of its
major and
minor device numbers, or as a path name
/dev/<blockdev> to an existing block device file.
The bindings already in existence can be queried with the
-q option, with is used either with a raw device filename to query that one
device, or with the
-a option to query all bound raw devices.
Unbinding can be done by specifying major and minor 0.
Once bound to a block device, a raw device can be opened, read and
written, just like the block device it is bound to. However, the raw
device does not behave exactly like the block device. In particular,
access to the raw device bypasses the kernel's block buffer cache
entirely: all I/O is done directly to and from the address space of the
process performing the I/O. If the underlying block device driver can
support DMA, then no data copying at all is required to complete the
I/O.
Because raw I/O involves direct hardware access to a process's memory, a
few extra restrictions must be observed. All I/Os must be correctly
aligned in memory and on disk: they must start at a sector offset on
disk, they must be an exact number of sectors long, and the data buffer
in virtual memory must also be aligned to a multiple of the sector
size. The sector size is 512 bytes for most devices.
Use the /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices file to define the set of raw device
mappings automatically created during the system startup sequence. The
format of the file is the same used in the command line with the exception
that the "raw" command itself is omitted.
OPTIONS
-q
Set query mode.
raw will query an existing binding instead of setting a new one.
-a
With
-q , specifies that all bound raw devices should be queried.
-h
provides a usage summary.
BUGS
The Linux
dd (1) command does not currently align its buffers correctly, and so
cannot be used on raw devices.
Raw I/O devices do not maintain cache coherency with the Linux block
device buffer cache. If you use raw I/O to overwrite data already in
the buffer cache, the buffer cache will no longer correspond to the
contents of the actual storage device underneath. This is deliberate,
but is regarded either a bug or a feature depending on who you ask!