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man pages section 4: Device and Network Interfaces

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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

cmdk(4D)

Name

cmdk - common disk driver

Synopsis

cmdk@target, lun : [ partition | slice ]

Description

The cmdk device driver is a common interface to various disk devices. The driver supports magnetic fixed disks and magnetic removable disks.

The cmdk device driver supports three different disk labels: fdisk partition table, Solaris x86 VTOC and EFI/GPT.

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. Raw file names 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.

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 fdisk partition for Solaris software. Other slices may be used for usr file systems or system reserved area.

The fdisk partition 0 is to access the entire disk and is generally used by the fdisk(8) program.

Files

/dev/dsk/cndn[s|p]n

block device (IDE)

/dev/rdsk/cndn[s|p]n

raw device (IDE)

where:

cn

controller n.

dn

lun n (0-1).

sn

UNIX system slice n (0-15).

pn

fdisk partition (0–36).

/kernel/drv/amd64/cmdk

64-bit kernel module.

Attributes

See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Architecture
x86

See Also

lseek(2), read(2), write(2), readdir(3C), dkio(4I), scsi(5), vfstab(5), attributes(7), fdisk(8), mount(8)