Alignment of disk-I/O from userland.

[Mark Valentine]

> From: wollman at khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
> Date: Mon 6 Oct, 2003
> Subject: Re: Alignment of disk-I/O from userland.

> I believe that the Standard allows practically arbitrary restrictions
> on what may be done with devices (since most devices, aside from ttys,
> are outside the scope of the Standard anyway).  It says that read()
> may fail if:
> 
> [ENXIO]    A request was made of a nonexistent device, or the request
> 	   was outside the capabilities of the device.

Hmm, but it doesn't say:

  [EDOOFUS]  A request was made of a nonexistent device, or the request
	   was outside the capabilities of the device driver writer.

It would be reasonable to enforce such restrictions on a raw device if
we still had block devices around, but it doesn't seem reasonable now.

		Cheers,

		Mark.

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