>> That "what it is reasonable for a disk to do" consensus *is* the >> interface spec I was talking about, not the de-jure non-spec of "you >> get whatever the device (via its driver) feels like giving you".
> That's sort of the point. If you want "what it is reasonable for a > disk to do" you should be using the block device [...]. > The raw device is supposed to be just that: a raw interface to the > device. It gives you access to all the mis-behavior of the device > with all its gory niggling little details. That's a nice theory. But it's not the historical practice. Typically raw device drivers do a nontrivial amount of cleaning up of the hardware's interface, such as dealing with bounce buffers and poking device registers. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B