.TH RP 4 .SH NAME rp \- RP-11/RP03 moving-head disk .SH DESCRIPTION The files .I "rp0 ... rp7" refer to sections of RP disk drive 0. The files .I "rp8 ... rp15" refer to drive 1 etc. This allows a large disk to be broken up into more manageable pieces. .PP The origin and size of the pseudo-disks on each drive are as follows: .PP .br disk start length .br 0 0 9600 .br 1 9600 8000 .br 2 17600 7400 .br 3 25000 55000 .br 4 0 80000 .br 5-7 unassigned .PP Thus rp4 covers the whole drive, while rp0, rp1, rp3 can serve usefully as a root, swap, and mounted user file system respectively. The disk rp2 covers a mounted file system containing the system sources. .PP The .I rp files access the disk via the system's normal buffering mechanism and may be read and written without regard to physical disk records. There is also a `raw' interface which provides for direct transmission between the disk and the user's read or write buffer. A single read or write call results in exactly one I/O operation and therefore raw I/O is considerably more efficient when many words are transmitted. The names of the raw RP files begin with .I rrp and end with a number which selects the same disk section as the corresponding .I rp file. .PP In raw I/O the buffer must begin on a word boundary. .SH FILES /dev/rp?, /dev/rrp? .SH SEE ALSO hp(4) .SH BUGS In raw I/O .I read and .IR write (2) truncate file offsets to 512-byte block boundaries, and .I write scribbles on the tail of incomplete blocks. Thus, in programs that are likely to access raw devices, .I read, write and .IR lseek (2) should always deal in 512-byte multiples.