SCSItape is a
BeOS
driver for SCSI-2 sequential-access devices, with emphasis on UNIX
compatibility. What does that mean?
- BeOS
Driver
- The driver was written for the
BeOS,
from scratch. Although several tape drivers already existed
at the time of writing, none of them did exactly what I wanted
(in particular, none worked with my DDS-2 drive ;-).
So I wrote another one.
- SCSI-2
- The driver assumes that it will handle devices which comply with the
SCSI-2 standard. No effort was spent to ensure that it would be usable
with older drives.
- Sequential Access
- The SCSI-2 standard lumps tape drives under the general heading
"sequential-access devices." The main difference between these and
disks is that it takes a long time to access widely separated parts
of a tape, and so they are usually read and/or written in a sequential
fashion. The SCSItape driver doesn't directly support any other
kind of use (although it provides positioning commands).
- UNIX Compatibility
- The behavior of the driver was modeled on several UNIX (or UNIX-like)
systems, in particular HP-UX and FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
The driver documentation has been split into several parts:
- The section on Tape Basics contains
an introduction to using tapes, and to their little peculiarities.
- The User's Manual describes how to use
the driver in conjunction with existing programs.
It also documents the tape control program,
mt .
- The Programmer's Manual documents the
behavior of the driver's exported functions, in sickening detail.
- The Glossary explains some tape-related
terms and abbreviations used in this manual.
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