Re: imitation block device in linux

I may be a bit rusty on my kernel design, but I believe kernel code becomes involved when you use block devices. You may need to write a device driver for the kernel and learn about major and minor devices. Read "man makedev".

IIRC there is a mini-tutorial somewhere out there in the cyber fields, for writing your own linux kernel driver.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

Comment on Re: imitation block device in linux

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Re^2: imitation block device in linux by chrestomanci (Priest) on Mar 18, 2011 at 15:37 UTC
If the OP wants to take that road then the O'Reilly book Linux Device Drivers is available. The text is under a liberal open source licence, so you can read it online for free. Another approach would be to create a FUSE filing system, and create an artificial block device or mountable file-system image inside. Having said that, I doubt that the OP really needs to write a block device.	[reply]
Re^3: imitation block device in linux by butchie3980 (Acolyte) on Mar 19, 2011 at 08:32 UTC
Yeah, I'm trying to imitate a block device, one that can be accessed by programs like dd, or even mounted with the mount command. My intention is to intercept read/write/seek operations and manage the data as it goes back and forth (logging, encryption, etc). I was hoping to stay with perl, but it looks like I might have to spend some learning curve on C?	[reply]
Re^4: imitation block device in linux by zentara (Cardinal) on Mar 21, 2011 at 14:51 UTC
I'm trying to imitate a block device, one that can be accessed by programs like dd Have you thought of making a ramdisk... it essentially makes a little disk device in your ram memory, which you can treat exactly like a disk. Google for ramdisk linux for many guides. UPDATE: I forgot to mention a loopback filesystem, where you can mount a file with the -o loop option and it acts like a disk device also. I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh	[reply]