Hugo Rabson wrote:
> I understand IDE tape drives are not yet supported by RedHat Linux - is this
> correct?
I waited on this until it seemed that there wasn't going to be a flood of
answers...
Gadi Oxman wrote the IDE tape driver that is shipped with RH 5.0; as delivered,
it does *not* support the HP Colorado 5Gb drive. However, there is a patch
available that does make it functional. There are gotchas, however.
1. EOT handling isn't. That is, because of pipelining and buffering,
you can't detect EOT. This means you cannot write blindly and
expect to reliably find the EOT and begin a new tape.
2. No compression. Compression on the Colorado 5Gb is software only;
the native drive capacity, then, is approximately 2.5Gb.
The most annoying, of course, is the EOT thing. HP, BTW, will NOT release
any information about the drive or its ATAPI interface, so it's all got to
be reverse engineering. (Rather, I should say, I've not found anyone at HP
who will talk. Yet.)
Gadi has not answered any E-mail about the driver, so I assume he doesn't
really want to get involved here. Cool; I haven't answered requests to
change cut & paste for years, either. Sometimes you just move on.
Anyway, given the above restrictions, the drive works well. If you can't
find the patch, I've got it and will redistribute, along with a tape test
program and, if you wish, some additional changes to the driver (ioctl
calls to turn on/off debugging and pipelining).
I haven't yet looked at the IDE tape driver for RH 5.1 to see if there have
been improvements yet. Nor did I try SCSI emulation, although I would expect
the pipelining problems to be present there, too.
Cheers,
--
Dave Ihnat
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