DEPRECATION OF RAW DEVICES IN LINUX 2.6 KERNELS (357492.1, published on 28-Jun-2006)
Starting with the 2.6 Linux kernel, raw devices are being phased out in favor of O_DIRECT access directly to the block devices.
With Oracle RDBMS 10.2.0.2 and higher, block devices can be accessed via any of the following methods, and utilized by RDBMS:
- Directly to the block device
- Via ASMLib mapped devices
- OCFS2 devices (Note: OCFS2 is still Pending Certification)
- LVM2 mapped devices if single-instance
This is really a good news for Oracle database running on Linux, but this is a new feature started with 10.2.0.2, the latest version, who knows is there any bug. I will do a test on my VMWare host.