One upon a time, that was the only way to get a filesystem over 100 M...

I have a friend who once (when his swap drive crashed) put swap on tape so
he could repair his machine. This was an NCR mini-computer, circa 1982
vintage. Talk about s     l    o    w....

Dan Baker

-----Original Message-----
From: Anders Magnusson [mailto:ragge@ludd.luth.se]
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 1:46 AM
To: agrier@poofygoof.com
Cc: port-vax@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: TK50Z-G3


> On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 09:28:00AM +0100, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> > > 
> > > 1. Use /dev/rst0. /dev/st0 is a block device. I don't know why MAKEDEV
> > > makes this, delete it.
> > > 
> > You _can_ actually use the block device, I use it sometimes. If you have
> > a real tape station (not a streaming one) then it should be possible to
> > mount it as a file system. I tried this ~6 years ago, and after some
> > tweaking of the kernel it worked :-)
> 
> do you recall what filesystem did you use, and what tweaks were
> necessary?
> 
I used ffs, it was merely for testing :-) IIRC I had to fix some ioctl's
to make newfs happy, and add bdbtofsb() (block conversion macros) in the
driver here and there. It was TU81 I used then which worked better for
winding the tape back and forth.

> this sounds like a crazy experiment.
> 
Actually I used it "for real" many years ago, when we had filesystems
on TU78. It worked very well.

-- Ragge