When you load your RAW file with CIRAWFilter, try setting boostAmount to 0. It's 1 by default. From my experience, this gives a linear response when changing exposure.
You can still get values greater than 1 if, for example, you increase the exposure enough. Try setting baselineExposure and exposure to 0.
In this era of EDR and HDR, I wouldn't consider values greater than 1 to be anything abnormal. If you don't want values greater than 1, you can clamp or otherwise map them to less than or equal to 1 when rendering. I suggest you avoid doing any kind of color value clipping in your core image processing pipeline (i.e. CIFilters and custom kernels).
Does this answer your question?