Using QIC-36 and QIC-02 tape drive bus systems with NetBSD

Software

Driver

Note: Currently NetBSD support only single drive configurations. Most of the cables I have seen are for single drives anyhow.

To use QIC-36/QIC-02 on NetBSD you need the driver "wt". It is activated by uncomment the corresponding line in the kernel config file (you have to adjust the ressources to match your setup):

wt0 at isa? port 0x280 irq 5 drq 1  # Archive and Wangtek QIC tape drives

Attention:
This driver can reconfigure some SMC network cards if they are located in the specified I/O address space!

After compiling, installing and running the new kernel, a message like this should be written to the syslog (and/or the console):

May  5 11:47:13 Server1 /netbsd: wt0 at isa0 port 0x280-0x281 irq 5 drq 1: type <Wangtek>

Device files

The following device files are used:

crw-rw----  1 root  operator  10,  4 Feb  5 19:50 /dev/nrwt0
crw-rw----  1 root  operator  10, 20 Feb  5 19:50 /dev/nrwt16
crw-rw----  1 root  operator  10, 12 Feb  5 19:50 /dev/nrwt8

crw-rw----  1 root  operator  10,  0 Feb  5 19:50 /dev/rwt0
crw-rw----  1 root  operator  10, 16 May  5 20:21 /dev/rwt16
crw-rw----  1 root  operator  10,  8 Feb  5 19:50 /dev/rwt8
                               ^   ^
                           Major   Minor

The first block are non-rewinding devices and the last block are rewinding devices.

Create a symlink with the name "/dev/tape" that points to one of these files (for convenience) like that:

ln -s /dev/nrwt16 /dev/tape

Using the drive

Now things are set up and ready. After inserting media in the drive you can do a:

mt rewind

Now the drive can be used like any other tape drive, but some things should be noticed:

• If the drive do not want to write to a tape, it probaby contains data in an unsupported format (and the drive wants to preserve the format). Try to erase the tape first in this case.
• Usually QIC-36 and QIC-02 tape drives have very small buffers. To avoid buffer underruns (which forces the drive to stop and rewind) an additional RAM buffer should be used. For "tar" you can use:

  tar -cvf - /datatosave/* | buffer > /dev/tape
  cat /dev/tape | buffer | tar -xvf -

• The drives I have tested seems to lack support for searching the end of recorded data. Do a rewind and read/write a single archive works.

Greetings to all users of ancient technology.