Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 19:43:36 -0600 (MDT) From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com> To: hans@artcom.de (Hans Huebner) Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is anybody working on the tape driver? Message-ID: <199805110143.TAA15207@panzer.plutotech.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980511010419.2259A-100000@transrapid.artcom.de> from Hans Huebner at "May 11, 98 01:36:36 am"
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Hans Huebner wrote... > I'm currently working at the SCSI tape driver (under 2.2.6-RELEASE) > because it seems to lack many features other systems already have. In > particular, I need better fast-locate support and a better device > statistics interface. CAM already has better (well, I think it is) device statistics support. CAM doesn't yet have support for read position/locate, though. > The current progress state of the tape driver seems to be hibernating, > similar to the changer driver nobody seems to have cared adding > functionality for quite a while. On the other hand, recent discussions on > this list indicate that people seem to use FreeBSD for backups, so there > should be some interest in better tape support. The reason the current tape driver has been "hibernating" is because most new work/features have been going into the CAM code that will eventually replace the current SCSI code. > I would want to integrate some of the functionality I currently access > with perl/scsi(8) scripts into the tape driver. This would involve some > structural changes to make MTIOCGET fully work, and also the addition of > one or more additional ioctl's. > > This leaves me with the following questions: Is there anybody else > working on the tape driver who would want to share code and/or > information? Are there any features in the queue waiting to be commited? It would probably be better if you did your work under CAM, if possible. The statistics code is already there, and I just finished porting the last of the userland statistics utilities to the new devstat interface today. Fast locate support would be handy, though. I am also interested to hear your ideas on changing the mt interface. I have made some minor changes in CAM, mostly for better compression support, but I think that code could definitely use a cleanup. In fact, I think mt(1) could really stand to be cleaned up a bit. One place to look for ideas might be the NetBSD tape driver/mt command. They have implemented fast locate support, I think, and their mt doesn't look like the #ifdef mess that ours is. If developing under -current is a problem for you, there will be a 2.2-stable port of CAM coming out shortly. I'm not sure if it'll be exactly concurrent with the next CAM snapshot, but I think it should be close behind. Justin has already committed some code to the 2.2-stable branch that is necessary/helpful for CAM support, and I believe he intends to do both a -current and a -stable snapshot in the next couple of days. If have a machine to spare to run -current and CAM on, feel free to send me private email and I can give you access to the CAM source repository. In any case, I'm certainly interested in your changes, even if you do them under the old SCSI code. (I can port them to CAM...) 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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