Driver for emulating a tape device on top of a cd writer...

Stelian Pop
2000-12-18T10:56:21Z

Hi folks,

I've got this idea some time ago, thinking it would really be
a neat thing...

Basically, I would like to be able to use a cdwriter as a tape
device, with software like dump(8) or tar(1). With /dev/tcdw
as name (for example), I'd like to be able to do:
mt -f /dev/tcdw rewind
tar cvf /dev/tcdw /
tar cvf /dev/tcdw /home
mt -f /dev/tcdw rewind
mt -f /dev/tcdw fsf 1
tar xvf /dev/tcdw
...

As someone said to me, this seems to exist on some other UNIX
system (don't recall if it was AIX or something else)... But
I didn't find any work on Linux in this direction.

I'll start to work on this, probably by looking at the cdrecord
low level code and porting it into kernel space.

The only technical problem I see are simulating the tape filemarks
on the CD. I'm not sure how to do this, maybe there is some
session information which I could use as a filemark...

What do you think about this project ? Would it be useful ? Feasible ?
Do you know about some similar work I could use ?

Thanks,

Stelian.
--
Stelian Pop <stelian.pop@alcove.fr>
Alcôve - http://www.alcove.fr