I recently posted a question about my attempts to get 2.4.4p1 running on a RedHat 7.0 box. I probably didn't mention that the plan was to go tapeless. This project didn't work and I can explain exactly why so others won't bump into the same wall I did.
2.4.4p1 compiles just fine on RedHat 7.0 which is a 2.2 kernel. This kernel doesn't have big file support. The file: device also works great. The problem is that while you can create large *tapes* on disk, you can't write large *tape files* on the tape since it is created in a file system that has a 2G limit. I actually ran into this with the holding disk but used the chunksize workaround to get past it without giving thought to what that meant later in the process when taper was running.... I guess I was too close to the problem and the errors pointed in lots of other places. It wasn't until a coworker was asking about the problems and I mentioned a list of DLEs with the problem and thinking of the list mused "...in fact, almost everything larger than about 2 G is giving an error of some type." This person suggested I run a test to see if a 2.2G file could be created on the host and it could not which made the problem rather obvious. Turns out that the problems all went away with SuSE 8.1 (kernel 2.4.19). In addition I can also verify that this same kernel has built in support for the Promise Ultra 133 TX2 card and will support a 200G IDE drive (Maxtor Diamond Max +9). Dana Bourgeois