Ever wondered how many “raw” devices you can create on a Linux server?

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in CentOS 7, Fedora, Linux, Misc, RHEL 7, Storage, System Administration

I have to admit this isn’t a question that crops up all that often, but given what I have been through over recent months, I thought I’d share with the world.

Lets start from the beginning…

What are raw devices?

Raw devices, are used when there is a need to present underlying storage devices as character devices, which will consume be consumed typically by RDBMS.

Some examples of database technologies where “raws” might be used would be;

  • SAP IQ
  • SAP Replication Server
  • MySQL

The list is not limited to the above, but they are the ones I know about.

Why uses raw devices?

Well, there is a belief (and probably some, maybe lots of evidence) that file systems introduce an extra overhead when processing I/O.  Though I would question whether in the day and age of Enterprise SSD and NVMe based storage solutions, whether it is anywhere near as relevant as it used to be??

So the idea is simple.  Present a raw character device (or multiples of)  to the database technology being used and allow it to handle the file system type tasks and thereby remove the (perceived??) overhead of a file system.

For me I can only think this would be really relevant in particular high, low latency environments, and even then I would be keen to see some base line figures to confirm if the extra admin overhead raw devices brings is worth it.

Hang on! You enticed me in with how many raw devices can you create?  So tell me!!

OK,  the greatest number of raw devices you can created on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Cent OS 7 system is… 8192.

That’s 0 all the way up to 8191.

Would I really ever need that many raw devices?

Well, maybe.  I doubt you would ever really create 8192 raw devies, as this would require you to effectively provision the same number of storage LUNs.

So how did I stumble across this (potentially unimportant) fact?

Well, whilst working on the requirements from my local DBA team,  I was also attempting to introduce a level of standardisation, so it was easy to see what the raw devices were used for.

Raw devices are numbered and it doesn’t look like you can use alphabetical characters in the name.  So a number standard had to be created.  For example;

raw devices numbered 1100-1150 might be the raws used to store the actual data, 1300-1320 be contain the logs and 1500-1510 might be for temp tables.

So if you also include a bit of future proofing and have a large enough number of storage LUNs to provision for use directly by the RDBMS then you could quickly find yourself constrained if you don’t plan ahead.

Anyway, the above was found out because I started to get strange problems when trying to create udev rules which would out create the raw devices, so I had a fun our of trying to work out the magic number.

For raw devices (if not much else) is 8191 (the maximum raw number you can use).