TU58 dump tool on Linux?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Wed, 2020-06-10 16:04:38 -0600, Eric Smith via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
[...]
> A real TU58 drive hooked up to a system running Linux does not look
> anything like a block device. Linux has no idea what it is; it's just
> something hooked up to a serial port. To read tape blocks, it would be up
> to a user space program to send the TU58 the right MRSP commands and
> interpret the responses.

I don't have a TU58, but using nbdkit[1] or BUSE[2] (which seems to
hook up as a NBD device as well) it should be quite easy to make it
avaliable as a block device. For reading and writing, this should be
pretty straight forward.

  Another route might be to use it as an actual tape device. ISTR that
these offer a few extra ioctls which might be interesting to have to
also support software that expects to talk to actual tapes. Both ways
would have their PROs and CONs... I'd probably go the nbdkit route,
but .. no hardware. ^^

MfG, JBG
[1] https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit
[2] https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE
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