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Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 20:16:43 -0400
From: steve2 (Steve Gerakines)
Message-Id: <199504050016.UAA05612@genesis.tiac.net>
To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Colorado Jumbo 250MB ft, and FreeBSD 2.0R
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
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> The "ready for output in input" errors are par for the course.  Ignore them.
> I thought I heard that the current maintainer of the driver was going to
> get rid of them by 2.1, but they're still there.

I submitted a patch some time ago but nobody committed it.  There was also
a fix in there to keep the motor from being activated during the probe for
people who do not have tape drives.  I re-sent this fix to Rod a couple of
weeks ago but I'm not sure what he's doing with it.

The fix within ft to avoid the messages works, but the correct way to
remove them is to get them out of the fd driver in the first place.  In my
opinion they should only be debug messages, since it's not as if the user
can take some corrective action after seeing them.  It would be nice if
someone did this before 2.1 is burned.

Also, a number of people have reported to be having problems with the
driver recognizing their tape drives.  They sound very much like
timing problems.  At one time the timing characteristics of the driver
worked for almost everyone as long as your CPU and bus speed was not
on the extreme in either direction.  It seems with PCI and/or pentium
systems this may no longer be the case.  Has anyone examined the DELAY
(microtime?) function to see if it is running noticeably faster on those
systems?

- Steve
steve2@genesis.tiac.net