Device Driver for Sony WORM dirve

[Dave Olson]

In <1991May22.100736 at gimmsiris.gsfc.nasa.gov> mack at gimmsiris.gsfc.nasa.gov (Robert A. Mack) writes:


| --
| 
| Bob Mack                            INTERNET: mack at gimmsiris.nasa.gsfc.gov
| NASA/GSFC Code 923                     PHONE: (301) 286-9393
| Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
| 
| 
|     I plan on connecting a Sony 12" WORM drive (WDD-600) to a 
|     Unix workstation using the Sony SCSI controller (WDC-610).
|     I'm looking for a Unix device driver for the Sony drive.
|     Does anyone know where I can find such a device driver?
| 
|     The optical platters were written to using a VAX 11/780. So
|     for starters, all we want to do is read logical blocks from
|     the drive so we can decode the VMS Files-11 file system and
|     retrieve out data.
| 
|     We have a variety of Unix workstations, but one of our targets
|     is a Personal IRIS.
| 
|     I've never written a device driver before, so any help is greatly
|     appreciated. Thanks

It MIGHT work with the regular disk driver, if it uses a 512
byte block size.  I had poor experience with some of the Sony
M-O drives though, until I disabled both sync mode and
disconnect.  both are in master.d/scsi in 3.3; in 3.2 there
is no way to disable disconnect.

Failing that, it ought to be a simple matter to write a driver
for it using the generic scsi driver (ds).  Most devices that
involve only simple data transfer can be written in just a few
days if you have the device manual and are at all familiar
with SCSI.  Some only take a few hours for the basic code.

There are examples of devscsi drivers in the
/usr/people/4Dgifts/examples/devices directory (part of the
development system option tape).
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.