CASTOR tape patch

CERN SCSI tape kernel patches for CASTOR

CERN maintains a set of patches for the Linux kernel needed for CASTOR operations. Following is a list of these patches with explanation, in order of decreasing importance. All recent CERN kernels carry all these patches.

SCSI tape patches for SLC3

linux-2.4.20-cern-tape_residue_report.patch

This patch fixes tape residue reporting by sacrificing partition support (which only DATs use anyway). This only works with synchronous writes and no read-ahead (the patch takes care of this as well).

linux-2.4.20-cern-tape_ansi_eof.patch

This patch fixes tape ANSI EOF reporting.

linux-2.4.20-cern-tape_timeout.patch

This patch reduces LONG_TIMEOUT from 14000*HZ to 3600*HZ.

linux-2.4.21-cern-raw_sense_dump.patch

This patch enables verbose raw sense bytes dumping.

linux-2.4.20-cern-symbios_odd_byte_fix.patch

This one fixes an unhandled error condition that comes from the Symbios driver when writing an odd number of bytes. Experimental, ugly, but Works For Us(tm).

linux-2.4.20-cern-ibm3590_load_display_cmd.patch

This patch adds support for the Load Display command on IBM3590 drives.

linux-2.4.20-cern-tape_buffer_kbs.patch

This patch is not strictly necessary, it is included for convenience reasons. It changes the default tape buffer size from 32K to 256K, that can be achieved by setting buffer_kbs=256 module option when loading the st.o module.

SCSI tape patches for SLC4 (2.6.9-34.0.1.EL.cern) *BETA* 2006-06-27

linux-2.6.9-cern-001_tape_residue_report.patch
linux-2.6.9-cern-002_tape_raw_sense_dump.patch
linux-2.6.9-cern-003_tape_timeout.patch
linux-2.6.9-cern-004_tape_symbios_odd_byte_fix.patch
linux-2.6.9-cern-005_tape_ibm3590_load_display_cmd.patch