raw devices

[Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P.]

Matthew Seaman wrote:

>On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 10:30:21PM +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>  
>
>>where are raw devices in FreeBSD? do they exist at all?
>>    
>>
>
>Actually, all devices under FreeBSD are raw or character devices.
>Block devices on the other hand disappeared a long time ago.  It's all
>to do with having an advance VM system, apparently:
>
>    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/arch-handbook/driverbasics-block.html
>    
>	Cheers,
>
>	Matthew
>  
>

Hmm, now I'm a tad curious --- or confused.  ceri@ just committed a
revised synopsis I hacked at for the handbook's Vinum chapter which
states, among other things:

    "In addition to supporting various cards and controllers for hardware
    RAID systems, the base FreeBSD system includes the Vinum Volume
    Manager, a block device driver that implements virtual disk drives."

So is there conflicting data here?  Might be good to figure out the
truth before the next edition handbook goes to the printer (which may be 
soon...)

However, I'd be first to admit a dire lack of knowledge here... help?

Kevin Kinsey
DaleCo, S.P.