Understanding the Logical Volume Device Driver

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The Logical Volume Device Driver (LVDD) is a pseudo-device driver that operates on logical volumes through the /dev/lvn special file.

Like the physical disk device driver, this pseudo-device driver provides character and block entry points with compatible arguments. Each volume group has an entry in the kernel device switch table. Each entry contains entry points for the device driver and a pointer to the volume group data structure. The logical volumes of a volume group are distinguished by their minor numbers.

Attention: Each logical volume has a control block located in the first 512 bytes. Data begins in the second 512-byte block. Care must be taken when reading and writing directly to the logical volume, such as when using applications that write to raw logical volumes, because the control block is not protected from such writes. If the control block is overwritten, commands that use the control block will use default information instead.

Character I/O requests are performed by issuing a read or write request on a /dev/rlvn character special file for a logical volume. The read or write is processed by the file system SVC handler, which calls the LVDD ddread or ddwrite entry point. The ddread or ddwrite entry point transforms the character request into a block request. This is done by building a buffer for the request and calling the LVDD ddstrategy entry point.

Block I/O requests are performed by issuing a read or write on a block special file /dev/lvn for a logical volume. These requests go through the SVC handler to the bread or bwrite block I/O kernel services. These services build buffers for the request and call the LVDD ddstrategy entry point. The LVDD ddstrategy entry point then translates the logical address to a physical address (handling bad block relocation and mirroring) and calls the appropriate physical disk device driver.

On completion of the I/O, the physical disk device driver calls the iodone kernel service on the device interrupt level. This service then calls the LVDD I/O completion-handling routine. Once this is completed, the LVDD calls the iodone service again to notify the requester that the I/O is completed.

The LVDD is logically split into top and bottom halves. The top half contains the ddopen, ddclose, ddread, ddwrite, ddioctl, and ddconfig entry points. The bottom half contains the ddstrategy entry point, which contains block read and write code. This is done to isolate the code that must run fully pinned and has no access to user process context. The bottom half of the device driver runs on interrupt levels and is not permitted to page fault. The top half runs in the context of a process address space and can page fault.