The st tape driver recently added the MTWEOFI ioctl, which writes
a tape filemark (EOF), like the MTWEOF ioctl, except that MTWEOFI
returns immediately. This makes certain applications, like backup
software, run much more quickly on buffered tape drives.
Since legacy applications do not know about this new MTWEOFI ioctl,
this patch adds a new ioctl option that tells the st driver to return
immediately when writing an EOF (i.e. a filemark). This new flag
is much like the existing flag that tells the st driver to perform
writes (and certain other IOs) immediately, but this new flag only
applies to writing EOFs.
This new feature is controlled via the MTSETDRVBUFFER ioctl, using
the newly-defined MT_ST_NOWAIT_EOF flag.
Use of this new feature is displayed via the sysfs tape "options"
attribute.
The st documentation was updated to mention this new flag, as well
as the problems that can occur from using it.
Signed-off-by: Lee Duncan <lduncan@suse.com>
Acked-by: Kai Makisara <kai.makisara@kolumbus.fi>
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <JBottomley@Parallels.com>
This patch adds a new MTIOCTOP operation MTWEOFI that writes filemarks with
immediate bit set. This means that the drive does not flush its buffer and the
next file can be started immediately. This speeds up writing in applications
that have to write multiple small files.
Signed-off-by: Kai Makisara <kai.makisara@kolumbus.fi>
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@suse.de>
Add new option MT_ST_SILI to enable setting the SILI bit in reads in variable
block mode. If SILI is set, reading a block shorter than the byte count does
not result in CHECK CONDITION. The length of the block is determined using the
residual count from the HBA. Avoiding the REQUEST SENSE command for every
block speeds up some real applications considerably.
Signed-off-by: Kai Makisara <kai.makisara@kolumbus.fi>
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
