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From: sverre@lev.Seri.GOV (Sverre Froyen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: Re: 1/4" SCSI Tape Drives from CSC
Message-ID: <9103061534.AA10744@lev.seri.gov>
Date: 6 Mar 91 15:34:56 GMT
References: <<9103060250.AA22134@strawberry.cs.wwu.edu>>
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>
>
>So far, here is a small list of changes I think are needed for minix
>to suppport the tape drives in a "usual" way:
>   a) Add tape scsi commands to the scsi driver. (kernel)
>   b) Add knowledge of tapes to fs, including ioctl calls.
>   c) Write a version of "mt" (or what every name you want to
>      call it) that controls the tape from a command.  (Things
>      like rewind, spacing etc. )

I started doing this under Minix 1.3.  Unfortunately, during the
upgrade, I forgot to save my changes :-(.  Here is how I had
envisioned doing this.

a) Add a general scsi ioctl which would allow any scsi command
to be executed by scsi_hi.c.  This would be used by an mt command
to position the tape (and could be used by a format command to format
disk drives).  This would avoid having to teach the kernel about
the specifics for each individual device one might want to add.

b) I was hoping that tape read and writes would be similar enough
to disk read and writes to be handled by the current code.

--Sverre

-- 
Sverre Froyen
sverre@seri.gov, sunpeaks!seri!sverre