Understanding the rationale behind dropping of "block devices"

Greg 'groggy' Lehey grog at FreeBSD.org
Mon Jan 16 07:20:34 UTC 2017


On Monday, 16 January 2017 at  8:10:16 +0530, Aijaz Baig wrote:
>
> But when I check the disk nodes under /dev I get this
> [CODE]ls -l /dev/*disk0
> brw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 0 Jan 2 09:39 /dev/disk0
> crw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 0 Jan 2 09:39 /dev/rdisk0[/CODE]

Are you sure that this is FreeBSD?  The naming convention looks more
like Mac OS, though the major device number doesn't match.  FreeBSD
has been through a number of disk naming conventions, but I'm pretty
sure that we never had anything as straightforward as 'disk'.

> what was there earlier in FreeBSD before 'block device support' was
> dropped?

Apart from the name, things used to look similar.  Here a quote from
"The Complete FreeBSD", written some time at the end of the last
century:

crw-r-----  1 root  operator    3, 131072 Oct 31 19:59 /dev/rwd0s1a
brw-r-----  1 root  operator    0, 131072 Oct 31 19:59 /dev/wd0s1a

The minor number included partition encoding, thus the large number.

Greg
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