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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
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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
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