Understanding the Linux Kernel, Second Edition

Block Device Drivers

Typical block devices like hard disks have very high average access times. Each operation requires several milliseconds to complete, mainly because the hard disk controller must move the heads on the disk surface to reach the exact position where the data is recorded. However, when the heads are correctly placed, data transfer can be sustained at rates of tens of megabytes per second.

To achieve acceptable performance, hard disks and similar devices transfer several adjacent bytes at once. In the following discussion, we say that groups of bytes are adjacent when they are recorded on the disk surface in such a manner that a single seek operation can access them.

The organization of Linux block device handlers is quite involved. We won’t be able to discuss in detail all the functions that are included in the kernel to support the handlers. But we outline the general software architecture and introduce the main data structures. Kernel support for block device handlers includes the following features:

• A uniform interface through the VFS

• Efficient read-ahead of disk data

• Disk caching for the data

Keeping Track of Block Device Drivers

When a block device file is being opened, the kernel must determine whether the device file is already open. In fact, if the file is already open, the kernel must not initialize the corresponding block device driver.

This problem is as easy as it appears at first look. On the one hand, we stated in the earlier section Section 13.2 that ...