From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Mar 21 22:21:50 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id WAA22805 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 21 Mar 1995 22:21:50 -0800 Received: from estienne.cs.berkeley.edu (estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.42.147]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id WAA22799 for ; Tue, 21 Mar 1995 22:21:49 -0800 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by estienne.cs.berkeley.edu (8.6.9/8.6.9) with SMTP id WAA01180; Tue, 21 Mar 1995 22:21:31 -0800 Message-Id: <199503220621.WAA01180@estienne.cs.berkeley.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: estienne.cs.berkeley.edu: Host localhost didn't use HELO protocol To: steve2@genesis.tiac.net (Steve Gerakines) cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Problems with 2940 and 950210snap In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 22 Mar 1995 00:15:44 GMT." <199503220015.AAA06755@genesis.tiac.net> Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 22:21:30 -0800 From: "Justin T. Gibbs" Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >> tar cvf /dev/ft0 >> >> And have it just work. The fact that /dev/rst0 and /dev/rmt0 both do >> this only leads the new user further down the garden path. > >This is in progress, and it has some advantages and disadvantages. On >the positive side, usage will be consistent with other tape drives. >Since ECC support is moved into the driver, I can now perform some >low level error recovery that the current driver is unable to do. >While I'm in doing this stuff I'm trying very hard to eliminate the >strange state machines within the driver as well. > >On the negative side, the driver is going to be much larger than it >currently is. I also expect that the tape drive will not stream very >well. (Ages ago the driver used strategy() for its work instead of >ioctls and performed poorly, but this may have improved.) The >last drawback is that with tar or dump you lose the ability to >random access files on the tape. A QIC-40/80 backup program does >this by storing the entire file directory at the front of a saved set. I believe that someone in the linux camp added support for this into gtar. >- Steve >steve2@genesis.tiac.net -- Justin T. Gibbs ============================================== TCS Instructional Group - Programmer/Analyst 1 Cory | Po | Danube | Volga | Parker | Torus ==============================================