| The bottom portion of Figure 3-14 shows two switch tables. One is used for accessing block device drivers and the other for raw device drivers. A raw device is one to which data is transferred in byte streams of varying sizes. A raw device may receive a single byte or many megabytes in a single transfer (or even gigabytes in today's computing climate). Raw device access is also used to talk to and configure device controllers and interface cards when necessary. Block devices hold mountable file systems. All I/O to a block device is directed through the system's buffer cache to reduce physical requests to logical requests whenever possible for speed and convenience As drivers are built into the kernel image or registered for future dynamic loading, they are assigned a driver number, often called their major number. Many of the major numbers are reserved and always assigned to a specific driver; for example, the logical volume manager pseudodriver is always assigned major number 64, while others are assigned from a dynamic pool of available numbers. This major number is visible through the ll or ls l commands. To list all the currently used major numbers for an HP-UX kernel, enter the lsdev command. In general, many more devices have raw drivers than have block drivers. The device switch tables are arrays of operational pointers. Each entry in the table consists of a subarray of jump points. The routines pointed to are entered in a documented order and cover actions such as open, close, read, write, and several more. If it sounds like we are talking about file I/O, you are absolutely correct but remember that in the world of HP-UX (and UNIX in general), all types of I/O are treated like file I/O. No matter what type of physical device a driver was created to work with, to system process threads, first you open it, then you read or write to it, and when you are through you close it! | 