The Ftape Installation Guide - Ioctls
MTIOCFTFORMAT
Most of the formatting stuff has been moved from the kernel level device
driver to a user level program ftformat
located under
`./contrib/ftformat/
'. Please refer to the documentation of that
program for further information how to actually format floppy tape
cartridges. The following gives only an outline of the ioctl interface
to the kernel level device driver. The argument to the
MTIOCFTFORMAT
ioctl has to be of type struct
mtftformat
. The definitions of that structure and of the ioctl are
included in a subsection for your reference.
Note that the MTIOCFTFORMAT
ioctl has to be accompanied by
several MTIOCFTCMD
ioctl calls. See MTIOCFTCMD. It has to be
understood that the MTIOCFTFORMAT
does not switch the tape
drive to format mode, neither does it erase the old format by means of
the `physical forward
' resp. `physical reverse
' QIC-117
floppy tape commands. Also, the MTIOCFTFORMAT
ioctl does
not compute the sector coordinates that have to be written to the
tape drive by means of DMA transfer during the formatting
process. There is subsection for each of the operations that can be
performed with the MTIOCFTFORMAT
ioctl and an additional
subsection that is a quotation from mtio.h and contains the ioctl
definitions.
struct mtftformat | MTIOCFTFORMAT ioctl definition |
FTFMT_SET_PARMS | Set software parameters |
FTFMT_GET_PARMS | Get software parameters |
FTFMT_FORMAT_TRACK | Start formatting a tape track |
FTFMT_STATUS | Monitor formatting a tape track |
FTFMT_VERIFY | Verify a floppy tape segment |
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