From owner-freebsd-current Wed Nov 1 13:49:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu (HURLAME.PDL.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.189.78]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E71837B479 for ; Wed, 1 Nov 2000 13:49:32 -0800 (PST) Received: (from magus@localhost) by hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu (8.11.0/8.11.0) id eA1LhVa30190; Wed, 1 Nov 2000 16:43:31 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from magus) To: Marcel Moolenaar Cc: Poul-Henning Kamp , Andrew Gallatin , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: linux emulation References: <22796.973109819@critter> <3A00830F.70D9CC14@cup.hp.com> From: Nat Lanza Date: 01 Nov 2000 16:43:30 -0500 In-Reply-To: Marcel Moolenaar's message of "Wed, 01 Nov 2000 15:54:39 -0500" Message-ID: Lines: 22 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) XEmacs/21.1 (Channel Islands) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Marcel Moolenaar writes: > Linux has the distinction between block and character devices. I don't > see any evidence that block devices can be accessed as character devices > as well (ie: there's /dev/fd0, but no /dev/rfd0). You can do this in Linux, but the way it works is pretty psychotic. They have a special driver that provides a raw character device interface for block devices, and you have to run a userland utility to bind a block device to one of their /dev/raw devices. This is new as of 2.3/2.4, but there are patches to 2.2 to allow it. Actually, it might have been backported and included with later 2.2 kernels, but I haven't been paying a lot of attention. --nat -- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message