From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Aug 16 13:48:04 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id NAA16435 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 13:48:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA16413 for ; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 13:47:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sax.sax.de (sax.sax.de [193.175.26.33]) by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id WAA24853 for ; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 22:47:56 +0200 Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id WAA27177 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 22:47:55 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.7.5/8.6.9) id WAA07032 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 22:12:06 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199608162012.WAA07032@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: File System on a tape To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1996 22:12:06 +0200 (MET DST) Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: from Alan Batie at "Aug 16, 96 07:55:22 am" X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL17 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As Alan Batie wrote: > What's wrong with 'tar xvf /dev/rst0' for an installation? You never know the contents of a tar tape beforehand, you always have to read the entire tape first, and store the TOC somewhere else. Thus, the current installation reads the tape into a temporary location on the disk, and continues to act as in a UFS installation. Naturally, this wastes much space temporarily. A tape file system would give you a directory, so you could (in theory :) first have a look there, and decide which block number to go to. OTOH, compatible tape file systems can only be dumped off a little- endian 4.4BSD UFS file system image, while a compatible tar tape can probably be created on anything running at least V7 UNIX. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)