Using the mt command

6.10 LPAR mode z/VM guest

There are differences between the MTIO interface for channel-attached tapes and other tape drives. Correspondingly, some operations of the mt command are different for channel-attached tapes.

The mt command handles basic tape control in Linux®. See the man page for general information about mt.

setdensity: has no effect because the recording density is automatically detected on channel-attached tape hardware.
drvbuffer: has no effect because channel-attached tape hardware automatically switches to unbuffered mode if buffering is unavailable.
lock and unlock: have no effect because channel-attached tape hardware does not support media locking.
setpartition and mkpartition: have no effect because channel-attached tape hardware does not support partitioning.
status: returns a structure that, aside from the block number, contains mostly SCSI-related data that does not apply to the tape device driver.
load: does not automatically load a tape but waits for a tape to be loaded manually.
offline and rewoffl and eject: all include expelling the currently loaded tape. Depending on the stacker mode, it might attempt to load the next tape.