NAME

ar − Archive 1/4 inch Streaming Tape Drive

CONFIG — SUN-2 SYSTEM

device ar0 at mbio ? csr 0x200 priority 3
device ar1 at mbio ? csr 0x208 priority 3

AVAILABILITY

Sun-2, Sun-3, and Sun-4 systems only. 

DESCRIPTION

The Archive tape controller is a Sun ‘QIC-II’ interface to an Archive streaming tape drive.  It provides a standard tape interface to the device, see mtio(4), with some deficiencies listed under BUGS below. 

The maximum blocksize for the raw device is limited only by available memory. 

FILES

/dev/rar∗

/dev/nrar∗ non-rewinding

SEE ALSO

mtio(4)

DIAGNOSTICS

ar∗: would not initialize

ar∗: already open
The tape can be open by only one process at a time

ar∗: no such drive

ar∗: no cartridge in drive

ar∗: cartridge is write protected

ar: interrupt from unitialized controller %x

ar∗: many retries, consider retiring this

ar∗: %b error at block #

ar∗: %b error at block #

ar: giving up on Rdy, try

BUGS

The tape cannot reverse direction so the BSF and BSR ioctls are not supported. 

The FSR ioctl is not supported. 

The system will hang if the tape is removed while running. 

When using the raw device, the number of bytes in any given transfer must be a multiple of 512 bytes.  If it is not, the device driver returns an error. 

The driver will only write an EOF mark on close if the last operation was a write, without regard for the mode used when opening the file.  This delete empty files on a raw tape copy operation. 

Sun Release 4.0  —  Last change: 18 February 1988