Re: FIFO

David Brown <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.archivers.star.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 07:42:39PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> This is different from UNIX as on UNIX, blockable tapes are blocked by
> default.
> 
> On Solaris you would be able to switch to a non-blocked mode by editing
> the st.conf file.

Linux's driver appears to allow the variable blocksize mode on DAT, but not
AIT tape drives.  It seems odd to me, since I can 'mt setblk 10240' and get
the same result.  It just makes it inconvenient because I have to know what
the block size of the written tapes were when I wrote them.

In the days when a 40 MHz CPU was considered powerful, increasing the
blocksize helped to keep the tape drive streaming.  Tape speeds have
increased less than or about equal to an order of magnitude, while CPU and
system speeds have increased several.  I guess an older machine might still
benefit from larger blocks, but I'm guessing that star's fifo helps more
than the larger blocks.

Dave
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