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  • Lee Duncan's avatar
    [SCSI] st: expand ability to write immediate filemarks · c743e44f
    Lee Duncan authored
    
    
    The st tape driver recently added the MTWEOFI ioctl, which writes
    a tape filemark (EOF), like the MTWEOF ioctl, except that MTWEOFI
    returns immediately. This makes certain applications, like backup
    software, run much more quickly on buffered tape drives.
    
    Since legacy applications do not know about this new MTWEOFI ioctl,
    this patch adds a new ioctl option that tells the st driver to return
    immediately when writing an EOF (i.e. a filemark). This new flag
    is much like the existing flag that tells the st driver to perform
    writes (and certain other IOs) immediately, but this new flag only
    applies to writing EOFs.
    
    This new feature is controlled via the MTSETDRVBUFFER ioctl, using
    the newly-defined MT_ST_NOWAIT_EOF flag.
    
    Use of this new feature is displayed via the sysfs tape "options"
    attribute.
    
    The st documentation was updated to mention this new flag, as well
    as the problems that can occur from using it.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLee Duncan <lduncan@suse.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarKai Makisara <kai.makisara@kolumbus.fi>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJames Bottomley <JBottomley@Parallels.com>
    c743e44f