Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.apfel.de!fu-berlin.de!fub46.fddi1.fu-berlin.DE!not-for-mail From: gusw@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Gunther Schadow) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Tape file system Date: 22 Mar 1997 14:14:04 GMT Organization: Freie Universitaet Berlin Lines: 28 Message-ID: <5h0pfc$7vg@fu-berlin.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: fub46.fddi1.fu-berlin.de (160.45.1.46) X-Access: 16 17 19 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37551 Hi, is it possible to write a file system onto a tape and then mount it like a disk? Wasn't this possible on the VAX? On HP-UX you can even boot from tapes, can't you? When I tried to write a disklabel onto the tape, it doesn't work due to missing IOCTLs for the st0 driver. Newfs doesn't work then either. Will it be easy to emulate a disk with a tape drive? Or do we need a separate tape filesystem driver? An other question is, why (or whether) lseek is not yet implemented like doing fast seeks as `mt fsr ...', any problems here? Should I just add an lseek system call for the st.c driver? I am asking because I feel like the tar (`Tape ARchive') is not as well tailored as it could be, if it had an index at the head and would quickly proceed to the position of the desired files to be extracted. Dump(8) has a nice directory feature `restore -i'is very comfortable, however, restore does not seek quickly but reads over the whole tape. Finally would it not be a file system like thing in the end? any comments? -Gunther -- Gunther Schadow------------------Windsteiner Weg 54a, Berlin 14165, FR. Germany Dept. of Anaesthesia, Benjamin Franklin University Hospital, Berlin. gusw@fub46.zedat.fu-berlin.de | http://userpage.fu-berlin/~gusw ----------------------------------------#include <usual/disclaimer>------------