Hello everyone

I am new in Linux environment and I need to create raw device for our Informix database.

Actually, there is 15 raw already defind by default. (SuSE Enterprise 8)

ls /dev/raw


I need to create alot more.

In fact, I would like to create different range of raws per Informix database.

example:
/dev/raw/raw1 to /dev/raw/raw999 will be assign to logical volume
/dev/raw/raw1001 to /dev/raw/raw1999 will be assign to another group of logical volume.

/dev/raw/raw1 --- /dev/vgdev/lvdev1
.
.
/dev/raw/raw999 --> /dev/vgdev/lvdev999

/dev/raw/raw1001 - /dev/vgqas/lvqas1
.
.
/dev/raw/raw1999 - /dev/vgqas/lvqas999

and so on.

I do have several logical volume of 2 Gig to assign to raw device to allow Informix (7.31UD1) to work.

Now my question is:
How do we create more raws in the /dev/raw directory?
Is there any limit on how many raws that can be created?

What is the use of the file /etc/raw?

All input will be highly appreciated.
stjacqd

Without knowing anything at all about raw devices or /etc/raw I can tell you that you make devices with the mknod command.
man mknod

For instance if you type ls -l /dev/raw/ you should see to numbers between the group and the date. The numbers are separated by a comma, for instance for ram it would look like this:
The 1, 1 is the major, minor numbers. The b at the beginning of the line denotes the ram is a block device, as opposed to being a c or character device. So I could make another ram device like this:
mknod -m 0660 /dev/ram2 b 1 2


Or if I wanted to make a bunch of devices:
for i in `seq 2 100`;do mknod -m 0660 /dev/ram$i b 1 $i;done

Thank you for the answer.

Based on your information, I did try some creation of raws.

It look like that we cannot have more than 255 raw. Is it true?

mknod -m 660 /dev/raw/raw256 c 162 256
ls -l

What should we do when we need more than 255?

stjacqd

I have this in my kernel config file.
CONFIG_MAX_RAW_DEVS=4096

It looks like you might need to make a new kernel.