Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 01:15:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FTAPE port to FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.950908011226.6439B-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <9509080538.AA09913@vimec.nl>
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Thought you'd like to know (regarding QIC-80 support in FreeBSD): I sent
a letter to the FTAPE mailing list (FTAPE is the WORKING floppy tape
kernel module for Linux) asking about porting FTAPE to FreeBSD. Here is
the response from Bas Laarhoven (the author of FTAPE). If it's not too
difficult I'll start on porting this over, but I won't commit it for
FreeBSD 2.2 until after I've made some significant progress on it. I'll
keep you posted:
On Fri, 8 Sep 1995, Bas Laarhoven wrote:
> > At any rate, the problem is that nobody on the FreeBSD team cares much
> > about QIC-80 tape support, in fact they feel that QIC-117 is
> > fundamentally broken. At any rate, the floppy tape support in the kernel
>
> It's not 100% reliable, but broken ?
> I think they meant that it's very hard to do and it stresses the OS as it
> must also do some real-time functions normally handled by a dedicated
> processor/micro controller.
>
> > is just abysmal since it requires a special user-mode filter to talk to
> > the kernel (e.g. tar cvzf myfiles - | ft) instead of just outputting to
> > /dev/ft0 like a normal tape drive! And because 'ft' is needed, you can't
> > use standard tools like 'mt' to fastforward or rewind the tape...
>
> Horrible, and this is called a unix ?
>
> >
> > Anyway, I'd like to port FTAPE to FreeBSD, since it seems to be a model
> > of good floppy tape support (at least in recent versions). Since it's
> > copyrighted under GPL, it would sit in the special gnu/ directory of the
> > kernel to signify its GNU status. Any objections? Anyone else working
> > on porting FTAPE to other Unixes?
>
> To answer your questions: 1) Certainly not and 2) not to my knowledge.
> Be aware of the fact that although the is currently an explosion of new
> drives (QIC-3010,3020,3080,Travan1/2/3) that use the fdc, I expect them
> to move to the IDE bus and/or dedicated controllers soon.
>
> Another problem may be that I won't be available to help you (more than
> a hint every now and then) as I'm soaked with work at my job.
>
> Anyway, success with your effort,
>
> Bas.
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Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com
Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL
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