The Ftape Installation and Usage Guide - MTIOCFTFORMAT
With ftape-3.04d the user level formatting program
(i.e. ftformat
) had to use mmap
(see `man 2 mmap
') to
map the driver's DMA buffers into its address space, compute the sector
coordinates to be used for formatting the cartridge and fill the memory
mapped buffers with this coordinates. This has been changed as the
parallel port floppy tape drives have on-board memory which contains the
DMA buffers.
Memory mapping those buffers is possible, in principle, but quite
complicated. It was much easier to move the computation of the sector
coordinates back to kernel space and abandon all that mmap
fancy.
To distinguish the two different protocols a magic number has been introduced which distinguishes the two protocols. It is chosen in a way that the presence of the magic number makes the ftape-3.04d driver bail out and the absence of the magic number or a wrong magic number makes the ftape-4.03 driver bail out. See struct mtftformat.
The ftformat
program of the ftape-tools
distributions
understands both protocols. For an outline of the old protocol refer to
the documentation of the ftape-3.04d
driver. See Start formatting a tape track (info file ftape).
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