Red Hat Raw device administration

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fully equipped with the administration tools to set up raw devices and administrate them during system start. To set up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system the partitions are administrated in the file /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices.

This is a plain text file contains comments and examples for possible configurations, as follows:

# raw device bindings
# format: rawdev major minor
#         rawdev blockdev
# example: /dev/raw/raw1 /dev/sda1
#          /dev/raw/raw2 8 5
/dev/raw/raw1 /dev/sdd1
/dev/raw/raw2 /dev/sdd2
/dev/raw/raw3 /dev/sdd3
/dev/raw/raw4 /dev/sdd4
  1. Once created, you need to bind the raw devices. This can be done by starting them from /etc/rc.d/init.d/rawdevices.

    [root@legolas init.d]# cd /etc/rc.d/init.d
    [root@legolas init.d]# sh rawdevices start
    Assigning devices:
    /dev/raw/raw1  -->   /dev/sdd5
         /dev/raw/raw1:     bound to major 3, minor 5
    /dev/raw/raw2  -->   /dev/sdd6
         /dev/raw/raw2:     bound to major 3, minor 6
    /dev/raw/raw3  -->   /dev/sdd7
         /dev/raw/raw3:     bound to major 3, minor 7
    /dev/raw/raw4  -->   /dev/sdd8
         /dev/raw/raw4:     bound to major 3, minor 8
    done
    
  2. To guarantee that the raw device binding occurs during any restart, use the chkconfig(8) utility.

    # /sbin/chkconfig rawdevices on