Quite a lot of the tape device driver code is outdated as devices and
storage systems supported by that code aren't supported by IBM anymore for
a long time. Especially physical tape devices are not supported or used
directly anymore.
The only tape storage system supported by IBM is the Virtual Tape Server
(VTS) family with TS7700 systems [1]. Host systems will only talk to VTS
and are presented with the virtualized 3490E tape device type only. VTS can
and still uses tape libraries with physical 3592 cartridges as storage
backends (e.g. TS4500). However, these are never seen by any host.
The general goal/idea for the tape device driver is to only support VTS
from now on. This series gets rid of old outdated code that is not
relevant to VTS. There is probably quite a bit more that could be
cleaned up or could be improved. However, this is a first run to cleanup
the code base and somewhat reduce maintenance burden.
projects / thirdparty / linux.git / commit
