[geeks] Raw disk access under Solaris

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2016, JP Hindin wrote:

> I'm going to break protocol and top-post because I don't have much to say. 
> Wow, thanks Jonathan, I really appreciate the research you put in below.

You're welcome; it was fun.  I dug through the Solaris source code a few
years ago for an internal storage-appliance project at $ork, so I had a
good idea where to start.

> I'll also go back over the Cray manuals and see if I can identify the
> block size.

I looked in the UNICOS 10 manual, and it claims that it presents 512-byte
blocks, but that doesn't really speak to what the IOS itself does
internally.

This says 4K blocks for the IOS in an Y-MP/EL, but isn't authoritative:

         http://www.0x07bell.net/WWWMASTER/CrayWWWStuff/Cfaqp4.html

Have you mailed the folks at the Cray-Cyber project to ask them how they
image the disks in their J90s?

I'm surprised Dave McGuire hasn't weighed in yet.  He's almost certainly
dealt with this on his J90 and ELs.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA