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LinearTapeFileSystem / ltfs

Reference implementation of the LTFS format Spec for stand alone tape drive
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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LTO9 Tape Drive fails to mount a successfully formatted LTO8 media #471

Closed tonyperk closed 3 months ago

tonyperk commented 3 months ago

Describe the bug mkltfs run has been run on LTO9 tape drive that has LTO8 Tape Media (000001L8) and runs successfully. There are output errors related to: cannot get remaining capacity log page x17 failed But it successfully wrote the index to partition a and b. And it states it is successfully formatted.

Then running ltfs, it states that it cannot mount the volume due it not being partitioned.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. Run mkltfs on LTO9 tape drive with LTO8 media.
  2. Run ltfs on /dev/IBMtape1 device that is LTO9 tape drive with the LTO8 media
  3. See error

Expected behavior Expect the ltfs to be able to mount the successfully formatted tape.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

Lintape: 3.0.59 ltfs: 2.4.5.0

piste-jp commented 3 months ago

Please read the quick start document before opening an issue. As it says you need to use a sg device instead.

Support of lin_tape was dropped in many years ago. I'm not sure why you want to use it at this time.

Please contact to IBM if you are using IBM provided pre-compiled version of the LTFS.

tonyperk commented 3 months ago

I'm using a build from 2.4.5 which was at least 5 years ago.

Also I have code that sends inquiry and TURs to sg device for health checks. So I cannot use sg device for ltfs. Also I still u see r lintape driver.

This should still work, no? It works with LTO 7 and LTO 8 tape drives. Just not LTO 9 tape drives.

piste-jp commented 3 months ago

Also I have code that sends inquiry and TURs to sg device for health checks. So I cannot use sg device for ltfs. Also I still u see r lintape driver.

This should still work, no? It works with LTO 7 and LTO 8 tape drives. Just not LTO 9 tape drives.

I believe the lin_tape driver backend was no more maintained when 2.4.5 is released. You are just lucky to be able to use it on LTO7 and LTO8. Please do not expect same quality on using an unofficial manner.

One more thing, I strongly recommend that you should not access to the same device with different device files. It could cause a catastrophic result against data on tape. For example #446, we never say LTFS works in such kind of condition at all.

I don't know which kind of health check you want to do but if it just check the drive is connected, you can issue statfs() call against the mount point. It request always issue a capacity query to the drive.

tonyperk commented 3 months ago

How do you address multipath devices? IBMtapeX supported multi path and sg does not.

piste-jp commented 3 months ago

Data path failover is already supported on the sg backend.

Please see PR #27 and https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs/commit/a23c6da1b64fe5d9c3b27bedd22b32f8dba67a24.

tonyperk commented 3 months ago

That's very good news that we now have sg-ibmtape data path failover. What about multi-path from a tape library? That is something that lin_tape was able to provide.

piste-jp commented 3 months ago

I'm not sure what kind of answer you are expecting but IBM Spectrum Archive Library Edition supports control path failover on it's sg backend for library, I think.

But it is not related into this LTFS project at all because this LTFS project is targeting only stand alone drive. So you need to contact IBM if you have an answer.