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x86, PowerPC Edition
The block-files access the disk using the system’s normal buffering mechanism and are read and written without regard to physical disk records. There is also a "raw" interface that provides for direct transmission between the disk and the user’s read or write buffer. A single read or write call usually results in one I/O operation; raw I/O is therefore considerably more efficient when many bytes are transmitted. The names of the block files are found in /dev/dsk; the names of the raw files are found in /dev/rdsk.
I/O requests to the magnetic disk must have an offset and transfer length that is a multiple of 512 bytes or the driver returns an EINVAL error. However, I/O requests to the 2K-byte CD-ROM drive must be a multiple of 2K bytes. Otherwise, the driver returns an EINVAL error, too.
Slice 0 is normally used for the root file system on a disk, slice 1 as a paging area (for example, swap), and slice 2 for backing up the entire Solaris fdisk partition. Other slices may be used for usr file systems or system reserved area.
Fdisk partition 0 is to access the entire disk and is generally used by the fdisk(1M) program.
where:
| cn | controller n |
| tn | target id n (0-6) |
| dn | lun n (0-7) |
| sn | UNIX system slice n (0-15) |
| pn | fdisk partition (0) |