[PARPORT] PARIDE and ide-tape; Amanda and the HP 5G drive (pt/epat)


soboroff (soboroff@xrce.xerox.com)
Mon, 23 Nov 1998 10:49:05 +0100


I realize I might be stepping into fertile flame ground here, but in looking
at the code for pt and ide-tape, I was wondering why the two were separate.
I figure that this is probably a historical issue, where the kernel
primarily focused on IDE devices connected in the traditional manner.

But I noticed that most mt ioctl's aren't implemented for pt, but ide-tape
seems to be a really fully-worked-out driver for doing basically the same
thing over a different set of wires. Ignoring any possible political
reasons, how difficult might it be to slip paride/epat underneath ide-tape
(or, for that matter, paride/* underneath ide-*)? Would an interim Right
Thing be to hack ide-tape to write through the paride layers?

Anyway, this seems so obvious I'm sure that there are lots of good reasons
for not doing it, so before I spent any copious-free-time getting into
paride driver hacking I thought I'd ask.

In other news, for what it's worth... I added the two lines to pt to make it
handle the MT_WEOF (write filemark) ioctl, by just calling the
write_filemark function. (duh). With this change, amanda doesn't die
trying to write a filemark. No patch since it's literally adding another
two-line case to the ioctl function in pt.c, exactly like the rewind case
except call the right function.

ian

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:18:47 EST