Tape drive handling on FreeBSD

[Matthew Jacob]

>Am I wrong?  Yes, when things work, I know it is hard to get excited about
making changes.

But the point here is that they don't work.



>
> 1. I believe that one can modify the FreeBSD tape API to become more
> compatible with Solaris and Linux without breaking any programs -- simply
> use
> their "trick" of allowing an open() in all cases to succeed if O_NONBLOCK
> is
> set.  I think this is an ugly kludge, but that is how they do it. If there
> is
> no tape in the drive, then return a file descriptor with no read and no
> write
> permission, and modify them when a tape is mounted.


That's probably do-able.

2. Certainly someone can certainly figure out some magic ioctl() that allows
> the user to set a mode so that the SCSI driver will do a forward space
> file
> (big number) when an ioctl( EOM ) issued.  The driver can do it *much*
> more
> efficiently and quickly than a program can.  The penalty is a bit of
> speed,
> but the gain is that the correct file number can be returned.



I guess in this entire thread I missed what you're looking for here (have a
heart- I'm on a 800x600 borrowed win98 machine in Toledo Ohio right now). Is
the problem here that you *don't* want to do 'space to EOD' when EOM is
issued? That is, you don't want to lose your actual relative tape position
information when seeking to append?