ltfs VS archive-program

Hi, What is the LTFS 'driver' you use for this? Some LTFS version provide a mode for supporting the buggy HBA. This helps time to time with some. It can be worst to try . Here is one version of LTFS i can recommend to use, and a link to an explanation about the Buggy HBA mode: https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs/wiki/HBA-info And link to issue of user having potential similar problem https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs/issues/144

I think IBM are actually the ones writing the reference implementation that HP and everyone else are basing their LTFS drivers on, so the compatibility list includes more than just IBM drives. In a production environment you'll probably be using the vendor software in any case. But I built the reference implementation on my home machine previously and it worked fine. https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs

There is also a fair amount of energy going into the reference ltfs implementation, which I’ve yet to try properly: https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs I suspect using this version would be a good idea in the long term.

Is LTFS (including "mkltfs") on any repo? Is CentOS 6 still supported? The IBM docs suggest RHEL6 was supported. I found an LTFS GitHub, but of course it says CentOS 7+ is needed. It doesn't show support for newer Linux releases, though (CentOS9/RHEL9, Ubuntu 20/22, Debian 10/11, etc.), so I'm not sure if there is a better source for LTFS.

I recently purchased a LTO-5 drive for my Gentoo-based NAS and have a few key takeaways for those who are interested. Don't buy a HP tape drive if you want to use LTFS on Linux! HPE Library & Tape Tools is prety much dead on modern Linux. Official support is only for RHE 7.x and a few versions of Suse. Building from source is a dependency nightmare that will leave you pulling hair. IBM drives have much better Linux support thanks to https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs. That being said, IMO, you should consider ditching LTFS for good ol' TAR! It's been battle tested since 1979 and can be installed on basically anything. TAR is easy to use, well documented, and makes way more sense for linear filesystems. While drag&drop is nice and all, it really does not make sense for linear storage.

Looks fairly active to me

If you ever end up in the distant future, go to Svalbard and look for the Arctic World Archive. They have microfilm copies of a huge amount of data. They have Wikipedia pages in microfilm format, so all you need is a magnifying glass to get started. You can then look for the Github Code Vault slides that explain how to restart technology from scratch and run the code in the git repository archives.

https://github.com/github/archive-program/blob/master/GUIDE....

https://github.com/github/archive-program/blob/master/TheTec...

https://arcticworldarchive.org/

According to Github:

> But why not for instance use a build system in some "container"?

I am not sure how this helps.

> I think the project could "bother" contributors with something like that, couldn't it?

Which project?

> An embedded C developer I've talked with quite often on some other forum, who imho is quite competent, said that Coverity is a poor tool that generates way too much false negatives and overlooks at the same time glaring issues.

He likely violated a license agreement with Coverity, since no one is allowed to say anything comparing Coverity to anything else.

> Said that's mostly an issue with all OpenSource tools for static C analysis.

I have been filing bug reports.

> OTOH the commercial ones are very expensive usually, with a target market of critical things like aviation of safety systems in cars and military use, places where they spend billions on projects. Nothing there for the average company, and especially not for (frankly often underfunded) OpenSource projects.

So you understand my pain.

> CodeQL? It's mostly an semantic search and replace tool, as I know? Is it that helpful? (I had a look, but the projects I'm working on don't require it. One would just use the IDE. No need for super large-scale refactorings, across projects, in our case).

I have never heard about this function. It is a static analyzer whose checks are written in the CodeQL language. However, it is very immature. When github acquired it, they banished the less reliable checks to the extended-and-security suite, leaving it only with about ~50 checks for C/C++ code. Those catch very little, although in the rare instances that they do catch things, the catches are somewhat amazing. Unfortunately, at least one of those checks provides technically correct, yet difficult to understand, explanations of the problem, so most developers would dismiss its reports as false positives despite it being correct:

https://github.com/github/codeql/issues/11744

There are probably more issues like that, but I have yet to see and report them.

> SonarCloud, hmm… This one I've used (around web development though). But am not a fan of. It bundles other "scanner" tools, with varying quality and utility. At least what they had for the languages I've actively used it was mostly about "style issues". And when it showed real errors, the IDE would do the same… (The question then is how this could be committed in the first place. But OK, some people just don't care. For them you need additional checks like SonarCloud I guess.)

It is supposed to be able to integrate into github's code scanning feature, so any newly detected issues are reported in the PR that generated them. Anyway, it is something that I am considering. I wanted to use it much sooner, but it required authorization to make changes to github on my behalf, which made me cautious about the manner in which I try it. It is basically at the bottom of my todo list right now.

> Wouldn't it be easy to add at least this to the build by using some "build container"?

I do not understand your question. To use it, we need a few things:

1. To be able to show any newly introduced defect reports in the PR that generated them shortly after it was filed.

2. To be able to scan the kernel modules since right now, it cannot due to a bad interaction between the build system and how compiler interposition is done. As of a few days ago, I have a bunch of hacks locally that enable kernel module scans, but this needs more work.

> Well, that's why I think something equivalent to `-Wall -Werror` should be switched on before writing the first line of code, in any language.

OpenZFS has had that in place for more than a decade. I do not know precisely when it was first used (although I could look if anyone is particularly interested), but my guess is 2008 when ZFSOnLinux started. Perhaps it was done at Sun before then, but both events predate me. I became involved in 2012 and it is amazing to think that I am now considered one of the early OpenZFS contributors.

Interestingly, the earliest commits in the OpenZFS repository referencing static analysis are from 2009 (with the oldest commit being from 2008 when ZFSOnLinux started). Those commits are ports of changes from OpenSolaris based on defect reports made by Coverity. There would be no more commits mentioning static analysis until 2014 when I wrote patches fixing things reported by Clang's static analyzer. Coverity was (re)introduced in 2016.

As far as the current OpenZFS repository is concerned, knowledge of static analysis died with OpenSolaris and we lost an entire form of QA until we rediscovered it during attempts to improve QA years later.

> But I guess I will stay with engraving my data into solid rock. Proven for at least hundred thousand years.

That method is no longer reliable due to acid rain. You would need to bury it in a tomb to protect it from acid rain. That has the pesky problem of the pointers being lost over time.

> At least someone needs to preserve the cat pictures and meme of our current human era for the cockroach people of the distant future. I'm not sure they will have a compatible Linux kernel and compiler available to build the ZFS drivers, or even punch card readers…

Github's code vault found a solution for that:

https://github.com/github/archive-program/blob/master/GUIDE....

I vaguely recall another effort trying to include the needed hardware in time capsules, but I could be misremembering.

For long(er) therm you could check out the GitHub Arctic Code Vault.