Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 20:42:45 -0800 (PST) From: dan@math.berkeley.edu (Dan Strick) To: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /dev/nrsa0 file mark handling Message-ID: <199812240442.UAA03018@rain.berkeley.edu>
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> "control open" - Already on my list. > > "mt_fileno/mt_blkno" - I'm mulling that one. Yes, I think I will, but > it'll take a lot of work because there are (now) a large number of > conditions that invalidate and make completely unknown those > relative positions (EOD, hard block locating). > > "current state" - Interesting notion. My motivation for wanting these things is that I have a program (designed for use with a different device driver that provided these facilities) that could repeatedly query the driver for device state and type the result using something like a curses overlay style. The result was something like a continuous drive status control panel that lent confidence to the progress of long tape jobs. It was also cute when used with disks (my disk driver returned the number of the most recently accessed block in the status struct). I liked to watch the heads march down the drive when doing disk-to-disk copies and such. I once considered doing a graphical interface that would draw a rotating disk with a sliding disk head arm over a numerical scale. (Note: pseudo cylinder numbers are useful even when not precisely accurate.) There are all sorts of other interesting possibilities. Bad sectors could be colored red. When disk errors occur, we could show bits falling off the disk and piling up on the floor. Imagine a snow storm of metallic film flakes. Color them dark red in honor of the traditional medium. but I digress ... back to work now Dan Strick dan@math.berkeley.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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