jim@b11.UUCP (Jim Levie ) (11/02/88)
The imminent delivery, I hope, of 1.3 and FFS has reminded me of one very
large hole in the 2090 driver. Namely that there appears to be no way to use
any SCSI devices other than disks. The necessity to unload, format and reload
my 140MB Fujitsu with floppies is the stuff nightmares are made of. I've done
it once and it took 3 full evenings just to do the backup. Think about it,
how long does it take just to format 65 floppies. And it's only 65 floppies
if I compress during backup. Since then I've carted the drive to work, hooked
it up to an Etherneted system and backed it up to an NFS server and thence to
tape. This works okay, but it's a little difficult restore a corrupted
partition quickly.
What is really needed seems to me to be:
1) Support within the existing disk driver for streaming tape drives.
2) A SCSI driver and separate disk and tape sub-drivers.
I could port one of the PD tar programs to the Amiga fairly quickly and
streaming 1/4" SCSI tape drives are readily available. Now if I could just
talk to one of those beasts.
Food for Thought:
Think about what happens on an Amiga when one has:
if((ptr = malloc(len))==NULL)
fatal("Out of memory");
strcpy(ptr, some_string);
and 'len' happens to be 0! (Manx C v3.6)
PS: SunOS 4.0 and SYS V behave similarly except for the "new" malloc in
SYS V.
--
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Jim Levie REMTECH Inc Huntsville, Al
The opinions expressed above are just that.
Ph. (205) 536-8581 email: uunet!ingr!b11!jim