[−][src]Crate pakr_rawata
Raw access to hard disks for Linux and FreeBSD. For technical information refer to ATA/ATAPI Command Set guide.
Warning
it bypasses all OS security checks and all software caches. You can kill the data on your HDD in a blink of an eye. The only protection is that it requires administrative privilege to run.
Supported operations
- read sectors using
READ_DMA_EXT
(ATA cmd 0x25, documentation chapter 7.21), - write sectors using
WRITE_DMA_EXT
(ATA cmd 0x35, documentation chapter 7.57) - identify drive using
IDENTIFY_DEVICE
(ATA cmd 0xEC, documentation chapter 7.13, including a detailed description of returned structure).
On Linux uses SG
subsystem, on FreeBSD uses CAM
subsystem.
Note
In theory, a single ATA DMA transfer is limited to 65536 sectors (32MiB for 512B sectors). Sector count is 16 bit and a full 65536 sector transfer is indicated by a sector count of 0x0000).
In practice operating system enforces much lower limit, in the range of a few hundred kilobytes.
On FreeBSD I managed to achieve stable transfers of 8MB at a time by re-compiling kernel with custom configuration:
include GENERIC
ident BIGDMA
options DFLTPHYS=(16U*1024*1024)
options MAXPHYS=(32U*1024*1024)
On Linux I didn't find any accessible tunable to bump-up the maximal DMA transfer size, neither compile-time nor run-time.
TODO
- support sector sizes different than 512 bytes
Structs
Device | Attached ATA device |
IdentifyDeviceData | ATA standard IDENTIFY_DEVICE structure. |