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From: steve2@genesis.nred.ma.us (Steve Gerakines)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: 386BSD QIC-80 floppy tape alpha testers wanted
Message-ID: <C815sp.LEC@genesis.nred.ma.us>
Date: 3 Jun 93 05:26:48 GMT
Organization: Genesis Public Access Unix +1 508 664 0149
Lines: 49
Guess it's about time I went public with this. :-)
I have been working on my own floppy tape driver off and on for a while
now. The driver doesn't do everything yet, but I want to make sure
that the foundation I have so far will work on other machines.
Here's what the driver can do so far:
o Be identified without problem at fdc probe/attach time
o Switches the controller to/from floppy operation
o Seeks to a particular block/track ok
o Does streaming reads and writes fairly well
What it doesn't do yet/has problems with:
o No tape formatting
o No QIC-40 format detection
o Tape occasionally misses a block while streaming (seems to only
happen during an ls command! - I'm still looking at this)
o No error correction (currently being worked on)
o No ioctl services
o Multi-volume archives untested but should work
o Detecting/handling error conditions in general needs more work
Basically, the tape works okay when being used with tar. However,
since tapes are rarely error free and error correction isn't working,
it's not very reliable yet.
Alpha testers will need a QIC-80 tape drive (Colorado or Mountain -- I
have a Jumbo 250). As far as the kernel goes, it is extremely important
that you have something like the intr-0.0 package by Bruce Evans installed.
This package cuts down interrupt latency dramatically, and provides a
fairly accurate ns timer for use with DELAY(). The floppy tape timing
requirements are extremely (rediculously!) strict, so the driver will
probably not work without it. (In my first re-write of the driver, I
wasted lots of time trying to get the timing right with a stock 0.1 kernel,
but it was virtually impossible.) Last, I based this on the old fd.c
driver, so if you have a newer version, you may have to do some hacking
to get it working on your system.
Incidentally, when this does get finished up, I could really use an
X11 and XFree86 tape from someone. :-) My ftp access isn't what it
used to be.
Please respond by mail with your hardware and kernel info if interested.
Thanks!
- Steve
steve2@genesis.nred.ma.us