*BSD News Article 98659


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.2.2 / DC2000 Tape Drive
Date: 27 Jun 1997 21:51:18 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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Pamela Nelson <nels@ncia.net> wrote:

>  - The density, block sizes are WAY off as I'm only getting about 10   
> megs per tape. (not incredibly efficient)

(That probably means the driver doesn't detect the correct tape
geometry.  Anyway, i'm knowing the ft driver marginally only myself.)

>  - When I try to use the mt command to rewind (or anything) it comes   
> back with "rewind: device not configured"

Sure.  The only program valid for the ft(4) driver is ft(8).  This
driver actually ain't a full-featured tape device driver, it's rather
a backend driver for the ft(8) filter program.  It neither supports
direct read or write operations, nor the usual MTIO* ioctl commands.

Nobody ever stepped forward (and really finished) to improve this
driver.

> I've looked around for "device not configured" but everything I find
> assumes that I haven't even compiled the kernel with the device.

Nope.  ENXIO is a catch-all response for ``Operation unknown to this
driver''.  The ft(4) driver further abuses ENXIO where it should use
ENOTTY (``Inappropriate ioctl for device''), see the very last part of
/sys/i386/isa/ft.c (the function ftioctl()).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)