Hi Harald,
> Thanks for the explanation, Thomas. That's what I assumed when seeing
> that hard drives seem to work, but what about more character oriented
> SCSI devices? Scanners and tapes come to mind.
I don't know much about scanners, but tapes are definitely block devices -
just without or with very limited random access (depends on the type of
device). If you access hard disks, etc. as character devices, the operating
system uses internal buffers and reads or writes only whole disk blocks from
or to the device.
I have never heared of any SCSI devices which are "character devices".
I would guess that the protocol overhead would be so large that it wouldn't
make much sense. But I don't know the SCSI specification exactly, I cannot
tell if character devices might be possible.
Ciao, Matthias
--
Matthias Heidbrink E-Mail:
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10717 Berlin, Germany mh@cs.tu-berlin.de
Tel. +49-30-8536361 mh@carano.de (at work; http://www.carano.com)
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