NAME

ar − Archive 1/4 inch Streaming Tape Drive

DESCRIPTION

The Archive tape controller is a Sun ‘QIC-II’ interface to an Archive streaming tape drive.  The tape controller can theoretically control up to four 1/4 inch streaming tape drives. 

For a complete description of the Archive tape drive and its controller, refer to the Archive Intelligent Tape Drive Theory of Operation available from Archive corporation. 

CONFIGURATION

Each archive tape controller consumes eight consecutive locations in Multibus I/O space.  It does not consume any Multibus memory.  The first archive tape controller should be configured for Multibus I/O address 0x200; subsequent archive tape controllers should be configured at addresses 0x208, 0x210, and so on.  The archive tape controller should be set up to use interrupt level 3. 

To make a node in the /dev directory for a specific drive, change directory to /dev and type the command:

        MAKEDEV  ar?

where ? is a number between 0 and 3. 

NumberControllerDrive
ar000
ar110
ar220
ar330

Device numbers are: block — major 2;  character — major 8.  The minor device number is formed from an eight-bit number of the form: 000RCCDD, where the three zero bits are unsued, R is the no-rewind flag, CC is the controller number, and DD is the drive number for that controller. 

FILES

/dev/rar[0-3]

IOCTL SYSTEM CALLS

The archive tape driver supports standard ioctl(2) requests.  There are two ioctl requests available for this driver:

MTIOCTOP
is a request to perform a magnetic tape operation (other than read or write). The names of the magnetic tape operations are MTWEOF, MTFSF, MTREW, MTOFFL, MTNOP.  Note that MTBSF, MTFSR, and MTBSR are not supported. The names of the magnetic tape operations are detailed in mtio(4).

MTIOCGET
is a request to return the status of the tape drive or controller. When this request is used, the caller must pass a structure to the request.  The layout of this structure is defined in mtio.h.

BUGS

The tape cannot reverse direction so BSF and BSR are not available. 

The system will hang if the tape is removed while running. 

When using the raw device, the number of bytes in any given transfer must be a multiple of 512 bytes.  If it is not, the device driver returns an error. 

Sun System Release 0.3  —  21 April 1983