file systems on raw & block devices

[amit mehta_2]

Why do we fire mkfs on a raw device for creating a file system and then mount the block device?

Why do we perform the above operations on different device interfaces?

mkfs -F vxfs /dev/vx/rdsk/mydg/myvol
version 7 layout
6291456 sectors, 3145728 blocks of size 1024, log size 16384 blocks
largefiles supported
mount -F vxfs /dev/vx/dsk/mydg/myvol /testfs

[Pete Randall]

The process of creating a file system needs to access the disk directly, not through the buffer cache. When you mount it, nowever, you want to use the buffer cache. It's that simple.


Pete