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At least this used to be the case. Nowadays FreeBSD doesn’t implement block devices at all - there are only raw disk devices.

• p_l 4y ago
  Something that, IIRC, came from Linux and it's allowance on at least some block devices to support "character" style access. Tapes are still annoying on both in their block-ness, iirc?
  • trasz 4y ago
    In a way, but in Linux block devices can still be accessed as block devices, while in FreeBSD (since around 1999) they can't - there's no caching at that level anymore; raw devices (which Linux got a few years before that) are the only kind of devices. (If you do "ls -al /dev", you'll still see block devices, but it's maintained only to pretend to userspace, just like major/minor numbers.) Tapes aren't block devices at all - that's why you can't mount them :-)
    • p_l 4y ago
      Mounting and a device being a block device or not had zero relation in classic unix though :) Tapes by nature are block devices due to only being accessible in block increments, and writing them in transparent way is a bit more problematic than with disks, as being able to just re-read a block to do read-update-write cycle isn't guaranteed - or necessarily easy. And yes, there used to be a time where you could mount tape as filesystem ;)