rhel6: dd fails reading/writing large blocks

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Issue

  • When trying to write tapes with large block sizes (1MB+) or reading tapes with large block sizes (10M+), this only succeeds sporadically. The error seen is
Device or resource busy" (read() or write() returns -1, errno = EBUSY)
  • We see this:
[root@host]# dd if=<SomeLargeFile> of=/dev/st<x> bs=$((100000))
/bin/dd: writing `/dev/st<x>': Device or resource busy
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 20.7455 s, 0.0 kB/s
  • Occasionally (1 out of 10) the write() or read() succeeds but mostly (9 out of 10) the operation fails with EBUSY. Smaller Block sizes work flawlessly.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
  • tape drive

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