2.1.109 SCSI tape weirdness

Jonathan Corbet (corbet@eklektix.com)
Mon, 27 Jul 1998 15:23:10 -0500


I threw 2.1.109 onto a real-time data collection system we support last
week. Works great except that the behavior of SCSI tapes seems to have
changed a bit.

The system has a BusLogic BT-948 SCSI controller, and an Exabyte Eliant
drive. If you try to do things with the drive when there is *no tape*
inside, you see the following:

- The open() call succeeds just fine. Once upon a time open
would normally return EIO in this case.

- If you then do a 'write (fd, buffer, nbytes)', the return value
will be 'nbytes' and errno says 'medium not found.' The errno
value makes perfect sense, but write should really return -1. My
program wasn't looking at errno if the write appeared to succeed...

I guess my question is: is this the intended behavior? It's a definite and
incompatible change from 2.0. If nothing else, the return value from write
should be fixed.

jon

Jonathan Corbet, Eklektix, Inc.
corbet@eklektix.com

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