Date: Mon, 08 Sep 1997 21:14:34 -0000 (GMT) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@tri-lakes.net> To: Gene Stark <gene@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Adding new tape geometries to ft... Message-ID: <XFMail.970908215943.cdillon@tri-lakes.net> In-Reply-To: <199709080423.AAA01759@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu>
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On 08-Sep-97 Gene Stark wrote: >The ft driver has some serious race condition problems, which for me >began to show up when I upgraded from a 486/33 to a P133. I have a >Colorado Jumbo 250. In my case, the problems occurred just after starting >to write. The driver would use up all its internal write buffers and >then >deadlock with symptoms such as you describe. As the write error recovery >code in the driver is commented out or not enabled, it goes into a loop >trying over and over again to write without failing out. The first time I ever tried it was on my AMD 486DX2-80, which apparently was fast enough to cause the problems as you describe them. I am now ruuning an AMD 5x86-133 overclocked to 150.. Quite a bit faster than the 80 MHz machine I had before this. Hmmm.. Maybe I'll put that turbo-button to some use. ;-) >I have submitted at least one or two bug reports on this (search the bugs >list for "stark"), with some fixes that at least for me mostly worked >around >the problem enough so that I could use the tape. The driver is >complicated, >and besides not having the proper documentation on the ft device, I >didn't >spend enough time on it to fully understand what might be going wrong. >There doesn't seem to be anyone in the FreeBSD group who seems very >interested >in the driver at this point. I'll try and track down your fixes so that I can get the last dying breaths (of obsolescence) out of this drive. I've only got about 20 or so tapes for it, so no humungous loss when I go run and get a new and better drive. >Although my Jumbo 250 is still installed, I have quit using it because >I have been experiencing serious problems with lack of stability of >the media (i.e. my tapes all go bad in an avalanche of failures after >two years or so). I can't afford to run DOS for the many hours it >would take to reformat the tapes, even if it helped, which it usually >doesn't. The tapes are way too expensive to keep buying new ones all >the time. Basically I no longer trust the tapes, which makes them >pretty useless for backup purposes. Also, although the 120MB (native) >capacity was OK back when my system had one 340MB and one 540MB drive, >it is no longer very useful for dealing with the multi-gigabyte drives >I now have. Space on the tapes is definately a consideration now. I've revised my backup strategies now so as to only backup what would take me too long to get back normally, and not the entire system. So far my tapes have stayed flawless (knock on wood), but I did spend the extra few bucks and bought the higher quality tapes (Colorado and 3M tapes, which I think are the same thing anyway). --- Chris Dillon --- cdillon@tri-lakes.net --- Powered by FreeBSD, the best free OS on the planet ---- (http://www.freebsd.org)
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