I found out in a few discussion forums that many people are asking about raw devices configuration in the next generation of RHEL. A lot of them are thinking that support of raw devices was removed from the distro. They are right because Red Hat marked it as a deprecated and related configuration file and init script removed. It may be quite confusing for the people.
On the other hand, it introduced another way how to achieve the goal, newly via udev. I think it is more convenient than specifying raw device bindings in the /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices file which is then used by the /etc/init.d/rawdevices init script. Here it is a simple example of old bindings:
/dev/raw/raw1 /dev/sdc1
/dev/raw/raw2 8 34The previous entries are passed to the
/bin/raw command and corresponding bindings are created:
/bin/raw /dev/raw/raw1 /dev/sdc1
/bin/raw /dev/raw/raw2 8 34To query created raw devices use the
raw -qa command. To be more familiar with the
raw command check the related man page (e.g.
here). Here it is its output:
/dev/raw/raw1: bound to major 8, minor 33
/dev/raw/raw2: bound to major 8, minor 34So, how to deal with the raw devices the new way? The udev "device manager" is a strong tool which is able to create device nodes on the fly according to kernel generated events. It can also run a set of defined commands if such a event happens.
The RHEL 5 introduced additional udev rules stored in /etc/udev/rules.d/60-raw.rules. This file can contain as many rules as you have bindings in your /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices file. Let's try to convert our two previous bindings to the new ones:
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sdc1",
RUN+="/bin/raw /dev/raw/raw1 %N"ACTION=="add", ENV{MAJOR}=="8", ENV{MINOR}=="34"
RUN+="/bin/raw /dev/raw/raw2 %M %m" Remember that udev rules cannot span multiple lines. The previous rules are splitted only due to its length (the RUN part is on the next line). If you specified a new rule and you want to activate it without reboot run udevtrigger command. Before you run udevtrigger check the rule with udevtest to see what's going on:
udevtest /block/sdc/sdc3 So, isn't it easy? From the presented examples it is clear that nothing changed. Only the /bin/raw command isn't called from the init script but directly from udev daemon. The syntax was changed the semantics remains the same.
