raw(8) — Linux manual page

NAME \| SYNOPSIS \| DESCRIPTION \| OPTIONS \| NOTES \| BUGS \| AUTHORS \| REPORTING BUGS \| AVAILABILITY

RAW(8)                    System Administration                   RAW(8)

NAME top

       raw - bind a Linux raw character device

SYNOPSIS top

       raw /dev/raw/raw<N> <major> <minor>

       raw /dev/raw/raw<N> /dev/<blockdev>

       raw -q /dev/raw/raw<N>

       raw -qa

DESCRIPTION top

       raw is used to bind a Linux raw character device to a block
       device. Any block device may be used: at the time of binding, the
       device driver does not even have to be accessible (it may be
       loaded on demand as a kernel module later).

       raw is used in two modes: it either sets raw device bindings, or
       it queries existing bindings. When setting a raw device,
       /dev/raw/raw<N> is the device name of an existing raw device node
       in the filesystem. The block device to which it is to be bound
       can be specified either in terms of its major and minor device
       numbers, or as a path name /dev/<blockdev> to an existing block
       device file.

       The bindings already in existence can be queried with the -q
       option, which is used either with a raw device filename to query
       that one device, or with the -a option to query all bound raw
       devices.

       Unbinding can be done by specifying major and minor 0.

       Once bound to a block device, a raw device can be opened, read
       and written, just like the block device it is bound to. However,
       the raw device does not behave exactly like the block device. In
       particular, access to the raw device bypasses the kernel’s block
       buffer cache entirely: all I/O is done directly to and from the
       address space of the process performing the I/O. If the
       underlying block device driver can support DMA, then no data
       copying at all is required to complete the I/O.

       Because raw I/O involves direct hardware access to a process’s
       memory, a few extra restrictions must be observed. All I/Os must
       be correctly aligned in memory and on disk: they must start at a
       sector offset on disk, they must be an exact number of sectors
       long, and the data buffer in virtual memory must also be aligned
       to a multiple of the sector size. The sector size is 512 bytes
       for most devices.

OPTIONS top

       -q, --query
           Set query mode. raw will query an existing binding instead of
           setting a new one.

       -a, --all
           With -q, specify that all bound raw devices should be
           queried.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Display version information and exit.

NOTES top

       Rather than using raw devices applications should prefer open2
       devices, such as /dev/sda1, with the O_DIRECT flag.

BUGS top

       The Linux dd(1) command should be used without the bs= option, or
       the blocksize needs to be a multiple of the sector size of the
       device (512 bytes usually), otherwise it will fail with "Invalid
       Argument" messages (EINVAL).

       Raw I/O devices do not maintain cache coherency with the Linux
       block device buffer cache. If you use raw I/O to overwrite data
       already in the buffer cache, the buffer cache will no longer
       correspond to the contents of the actual storage device
       underneath. This is deliberate, but is regarded as either a bug
       or a feature, depending on who you ask!

AUTHORS top

       Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>

REPORTING BUGS top

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
       https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY top

       The raw command is part of the util-linux package which can be
       downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page
       is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
       utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have
       a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2021-08-27. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2021-08-24.) If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in
       this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
       send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

util-linux 2.37.85-637cc       2021-04-02                         RAW(8)

Pages that refer to this page: open(2)