NAME

ar − Archive 1/4 inch Streaming Tape Drive

SYNOPSIS — SUN-2

device ar0 at mbio ? csr 0x200 priority 3
device ar1 at mbio ? csr 0x208 priority 3

DESCRIPTION

The Archive tape controller is a Sun ‘QIC-II’ interface to an Archive streaming tape drive.  It provides a standard tape interface to the device, see mtio(4), with some deficiencies listed under BUGS below.

The maximum blocksize for the raw device is limited only by available memory. 

FILES

/dev/rar∗
/dev/nrar∗non-rewinding

SEE ALSO

mtio(4)
Archive Intelligent Tape Drive Theory of Operation, Archive Corporation  (Sun 8000-1058-01)
Archive Product Manual (Sidewinder 1/4" Streaming Cartridge Tape Drive) (Sun 800-0628-01)
Sun 1/4" Tape Interface − User Manual (Sun 800-0415-01)

DIAGNOSTICS

ar∗: would not initialize. 

"ar∗: already open."
The tape can be open by only one process at a time.

ar∗: no such drive. 

ar∗: no cartridge in drive. 

ar∗: cartridge is write protected. 

ar: interrupt from unitialized controller %x. 

ar∗: many retries, consider retiring this tape. 

ar∗: %b error at block # %d punted. 

ar∗: %b error at block # %d. 

ar: giving up on Rdy, try again. 

BUGS

The tape cannot reverse direction so the BSF and BSR ioctls are not supported. 

The FSR ioctl is not supported. 

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. 

The driver will only write an end of file mark on close if the last operation was a write, without regard for the mode used when opening the file.  This will cause empty files to be deleted on a raw tape copy operation. 

Sun Release 3.0β  —  Last change: 16 September 1985