scooper@athos.rutgers.edu (Simon Cooper) (03/01/91)
SGI supply a number of features on their tape device drivers, the following
is from the manual entry of an ISI tape drive (see `man ts')....
Device Specific User Friendly Comments
Name Name
/dev/mt/ts0d0 /dev/tape Rewind device
(Standard
Interface). Bytes
are swapped in
order to be
compatible with the
IRIS 2000 and 3000
workstation family.
/dev/mt/ts0d0nr /dev/nrtape Non-rewinding
device. Bytes are
swapped in order to
be compatible with
the IRIS 2000 and
3000 workstation
family.
/dev/mt/ts0d0ns /dev/tapens Rewind device.
Bytes are not
swapped.
/dev/mt/ts0d0nrns /dev/nrtapens Non-rewinding
device. Bytes are
not swapped.
The information about byte swapping does appear in the tps (scsi tape)
manual page but is not as obvious. It also explains that on exabytes
/dev/tape is linked to the non-byte swapping driver for performance reasons.
I have used the IRIX 3.3.1 online manual pages to obtain this information.
Simon Cooper.