Increasing raw device limit?

[robnava]

I'm running SuSE SLES8, and I'm working on some raw I/O tests to a number of RAID 5 arrays. In order to perform raw I/O I have to run the 'raw' command to bind a major/minor number (by partition in my case) to a raw device and then perform the I/O to that raw device. I'm doing something like this:

raw /dev/raw1 /dev/sdb1
raw /dev/raw2 /dev/sdc1
...
raw/dev/raw15 /dev/sdp1

Then I'm out of raw devices.

There are only 15 raw devices available by default (/dev/raw1 thru /dev/raw15) and I have way more disks than 15. Is there a way to increase the number of raw devices so that I may test > 15 disks? I know that a colleague has run on RedHat and he reported seeing 255 raw devices (still kind of low for some people's needs). I need to create more /dev/raw/raw# devices. Can anyone help?

[mdwatts]

Create with

cd /dev

mknod raw16 c 162 16
mknod raw17 c 162 17
mknod raw18 c 162 18
.
.
.
and so on ...

[robnava]

Thanks, that worked like a charm!

-Rob