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8.8.7.1: Differences between ftape-3.04d and ftape-4.03

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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