How to access block-devices from kernel-space?

Hi,

I am currently working on a block-device driver which implements a
logical block device on top of a real block device.
There are several examples showing how to write a block device driver
and that seems straight-forward, however accessing the backing block
device is causing me headache.
I found the bio API to be quite complex for what I am trying to do -
the old "buffer-head" API on the other hand seems to be almost
undocumented.

Is there another/simpler way to read/write block-devices in a
synchronous manner?
What I am looking is something like the read/write syscall
functionality, however I would like to avoid using the syscall-code
for overhead reasons.

Thank you in advance, Clemens
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