On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 18:07, Luca Ferrari wrote: > Hi all, > this may sound trivial, in the case please insult me, but I've a > little doubt about disk devices. > In the OpenBSD way there are two devices: a block one and a character > one (and I believe this is the rightmost way). You do low level > operations on the raw device and mount the block device. > On other Unix operating system there is a single character device on > which you do low level operations and that you can mount. > On pretending-to-be-unix operating system you have a single block > device on which you can do both low level and mounting operations. > Now, the raw device in OpenBSD is just an alias of the block device > (or vice versa) and there is no caching of data outside the vnode > layer, or is there a more complex eplaination?
The block devices are mostly historic artifact. You usually want the character device; the block device is almost exclusively for mount. It's probably a mistake to try to use both at the same time.
