> Hey.... I may have said this to the list already, but, is it possible to just
> make an ioctl() for the block devices that turns off the buffering? Seems a
> more elegant solution than having a two device files for every single block
> device.
That's at least what legacy software expects ...
The whole matter is a bit more complicated because some devices (actually
a whole lot of intelligent hardware) do massive reordering of pending i/o
requests. So a real solution has to include work on device driver level.
Somebody is actually working on that but it will take a while.
Ralf