HP-UX Reference (11i v2 07/12) - 7 Device (Special) Files, 9 General Information, Index (vol 10)

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100

mt(7) mt(7)

Use the rmsf command to clean up unused device ﬁles. Otherwise, the property table may overﬂow and

cause the mksf command to fail.

Density codes listed in <sys/mtio.h> have device-dependent behaviors. See the hardware manual for

your tape device to ﬁnd which densities are valid. For some devices, these values may be referred to as for-

mats instead of densities.

Use of unbuffered mode can reduce performance and increase media wear.

Reads and writes from/to older (ﬁxed block) devices such as QIC150 must occur at exact multiples of the

supported block size.

Write operations on a QIC device can be initiated only at BOT or EOD. QIC devices will not allow writes

with the tape positioned in the middle of recorded data.

The offline operation puts the QIC drive ofﬂine. The cartridge is not ejected as is done for DDS. To

put the drive back online, the cartridge has to be manually ejected and then reinserted.

Sequential-access devices that use the SCSI I/O interface may not always report true media position.

On a 3480 device with data compression enabled, writing of a single record that cannot be compressed to

less than 102,400 bytes is not supported.

Note that using the 8200 format on 8500-style 8mm devices will signiﬁcantly reduce tape capacity, and that

only the 8500c-density setting provides support for setmarks.

The maximum I/O request for 8mm devices is limited to 240KB.

DEPENDENCIES

Driver-Speciﬁc Options for stape (major number 205)

The following options may be used in creating device special ﬁles for tape drives that access the

stape

driver:

e Exhaustive mode is enabled (default is disabled).

When exhaustive mode is enabled, the driver will, if necessary, attempt several different

conﬁguration options when opening a device. The ﬁrst attempt follows the minor number

conﬁguration exactly, but if that fails, the driver attempts other likely conﬁguration values.

With Exhaustive mode disabled, the driver makes only one attempt to conﬁgure a device using the

conﬁguration indicated in the minor number.

p Speciﬁes a partitioned tape whose currently active partition is partition 1 (closest to BOT (begin-

ning of tape)). Optional partition 1 is closest to BOT for possible use as a volume directory. The

default partition without this option is partition 0. If partitioning is unsupported, the entire tape is

referred to as partition 0.

s[#] Speciﬁes ﬁxed-block mode; the optional number indicates the block size. If the number is not

present, the driver selects a default block size appropriate to the device type.

Driver Speciﬁc Options for tape2 (major number 212)

The following options may be used in creating device special ﬁles for tape drives that access the

tape2

driver:

o Diagnostic messages to the console are suppressed.

z The tape driver will attempt to mimic the behavior of RTE systems; that is, the driver will not do

any tape alteration or movement when the device is closed.

AUTHOR

mt was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley.

FILES

/dev/rmt/* tape device special ﬁles

<sys/mtio.h> constants and macros for use with tapes

/etc/mtconfig conﬁguration property table for tapes

/dev/rmt/*config device ﬁles for accessing conﬁguration properties table - for internal use only