generic I/O

Are there existing generic block device I/O operations available already? I am familiar with constructing and submitting 'struct bio's, but what I'd like to do would be greatly simplified if there was an existing I/O interface similar to the posix 'read' and 'write' functions. If they don't exist, I would probably end up writing functions like: int blk_read(struct block_device *bdev, void *buffer, off_t length); int blk_write(struct block_device *bdev, void *buffer, off_t length); Pros and cons to this sort of approach? -Kai Meyer