Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 14:39:18 -0600 (MDT) From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com> To: hans@artcom.de (Hans Huebner) Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ch.c: CHIOGSTATUS is broken - How should I fix it? Message-ID: <199805052039.OAA15238@panzer.plutotech.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980505191042.17499A-100000@transrapid.artcom.de> from Hans Huebner at "May 5, 98 07:28:44 pm"
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Hans Huebner wrote... > today I moved our Q47 DLT robot from an SGI to a FreeBSD we intend to > dedicate to backups. The Q47 talks SCSI-2, thus I assumed that the ch > driver included with FreeBSD should do fine to control the thing. > Unfortunatly, the 'chio status' command did not work. I tracked the > problem down to a bug in the driver - The SCSI_DATA_IN flag in the > scsi_scsi_cmd call is missing, and as such the driver is unable to > transfer the status information from the robot. This was easy to fix, of > course. > > As our DLT robot has a barcode reader, I now intend to add a way to read > the complete status information including the barcode label information > from the robot. Currently, only a restricted set of flags can be read > through the ch driver into the user mode application. > > This raises the question whether I should actually add a new ioctl (say > CHIOGSTATUSEXT) to the ch driver or change the current meaning of the > CHIOGSTATUS call to return complete status information to the calling > application. > > The first option would be transparent to binaries making use of the > current ch interface, but it would add another ioctl which does behave > similar to CHIOGSTATUS, only better. The second option could be > implemented with source-level compatibility, requiring a recompile for > applications which use the current interface, but it would also keep the > ch driver free from redundancy. > > Given that most FreeBSD users use only software they have the source for, > I'd rather change CHIOSTATUS to be smarter. This will only affect a few, > if any, users of the ch driver since CHIOCSTATUS is currently broken > anyhow. > > By the way: If anyone volunteers to commit the updated ch driver, I'd > promise a manual page update for ch(4) as well ;) > > Opinions, anyone? Well, no one else has spoken up, so I will. :) IMO, you should change the CHIOGSTATUS ioctl to return all the relevant information. If folks update their kernels, they'd better update their userland binaries as well. I just ported the NetBSD ch(4) driver to CAM a few weeks ago. It will be in the next CAM snapshot. The FreeBSD changer driver (the one in -current) is basically an older version of the same driver. I would be interested to see your changes to display volume tags; I think they would be useful, and I'd like to add them to the CAM changer driver. If you want to implement your changes under CAM, I can give you the CAM changer driver and the chio changes in patch form against the last snapshot. Or, if you want, send me private email and I can give you access to the CAM source repository. For information on CAM, see: ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/cam/README or ftp://ftp.kdm.org/pub/FreeBSD/cam/README If you'd rather put your changer fixes in -current, I'm still interested but I can't commit them for you. (I'm not a committer.) I'm sure someone else would be willing to do it, though. Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@plutotech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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