Confused about RAW devices ...

DAVID BALAZIC (david.balazic@uni-mb.si)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 14:01:46 +0100 (MET)


Supposedly raw devices are going into kernel 2.4
( http://linuxtoday.com/story.php3?sn=10698 )

I'm confused a bit ? What are those raw devices ?

The mentioned article says :
> A raw device is one whose accesses are not handled through the caching
> layer and whose actions are immediately and always synchronous with the
> "hard" data on the disk or elsewhere.

How is this different from normal devices ?

I did a small test :
(2) fd=open("/dev/cdrom",O_RDONLY);
read(fd,buffer,1);
wait_a_second();
read(fd,buffer,1);

When the second read is done , the CD-drive spins the CD up and the drive LED
blinks. No sign of caching. ( kernel v2.2.12 )

And even if there were, using the O_SYNC flag should tell the driver :
"Don't cache this , dude !" and there is no need for new device files.

A related question : Why are accesses to devices ( /dev/cdrom and /dev/fd0 are
the ones I tested ) NOT cached ?

Am I missing something important ?

-- 
David Balazic , student
E-mail   : 1stein@writeme.com     |     living in  sLOVEnija
home page: http://surf.to/stein
Computer: Amiga 1200 + Quantum LPS-340AT
--

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