Package: wnpp Version: N/A; reported 2006-01-01 Severity: wishlist Package name : devio Version : 1.1 Upstream Author : John Bowler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> URL : http://devio.sourceforge.net/ License : MIT Description :
devio is a command line tool designed to read and write data to block devices. It allows random access to the device. Read and write operations occur in complete device blocks and are optimised to avoid a write if the data has not changed. IO in devio is optimised for reading and writing sections of block devices. The main consideration is to restrict all accesses to the device to whole device blocks aligned to a device block boundary. Standard stdio implementations do the same thing, however this is not guaranteed by the stdio API. In addition devio performs all write operations as read-modify-write, with the write only being done if the modify really changed some data. This is important with flash (MTD) devices where a write requires an erase and reduces the life of the flash device. devio write operations are fully synced, using the fdatasync(2) system call, and fully checked for error conditions. The byte reading and formatting support in the devio commands is intended to facilitate operations where it is necessary to interpret information contained within the device. This frequently happens during system bootstrap of embedded systems where the flash memory contains important configuration data. Examples of use can be found at http://devio.sourceforge.net/devio-manual/example.htm devio is used extensively in the NSLU2-Linux project (http://www.nslu2-linux.org) to interact safely with the internal flash memory of a running Linux system. devio will be used in a future NSLU2 Debian kernel package postinst to install the new kernel into the internal flash memory (which requires prepending some code to set the machine id correctly, and byteswapping the little-endian arm kernel to allow it to run from the RedBoot bootloader which sets up the device in big-endian mode by default. -- Rod Whitby (NSLU2-Linux Project Lead) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
