9.4 Blocking

Block and record terminology is rather confused, and it is also confusing to the expert reader. On the other hand, readers who are new to the field have a fresh mind, and they may safely skip the next two paragraphs, as the remainder of this manual uses those two terms in a quite consistent way.

John Gilmore, the writer of the public domain tar from which GNU tar was originally derived, wrote (June 1995):

The nomenclature of tape drives comes from IBM, where I believe they were invented for the IBM 650 or so. On IBM mainframes, what is recorded on tape are tape blocks. The logical organization of data is into records. There are various ways of putting records into blocks, including F (fixed sized records), V (variable sized records), FB (fixed blocked: fixed size records, n to a block), VB (variable size records, n to a block), VSB (variable spanned blocked: variable sized records that can occupy more than one block), etc. The JCL ‘DD RECFORM=’ parameter specified this to the operating system.

The Unix man page on tar was totally confused about this. When I wrote PD TAR, I used the historically correct terminology (tar writes data records, which are grouped into blocks). It appears that the bogus terminology made it into POSIX (no surprise here), and now François has migrated that terminology back into the source code too.

The term physical block means the basic transfer chunk from or to a device, after which reading or writing may stop without anything being lost. In this manual, the term block usually refers to a disk physical block, assuming that each disk block is 512 bytes in length. It is true that some disk devices have different physical blocks, but tar ignore these differences in its own format, which is meant to be portable, so a tar block is always 512 bytes in length, and block always mean a tar block. The term logical block often represents the basic chunk of allocation of many disk blocks as a single entity, which the operating system treats somewhat atomically; this concept is only barely used in GNU tar.

The term physical record is another way to speak of a physical block, those two terms are somewhat interchangeable. In this manual, the term record usually refers to a tape physical block, assuming that the tar archive is kept on magnetic tape. It is true that archives may be put on disk or used with pipes, but nevertheless, tar tries to read and write the archive one record at a time, whatever the medium in use. One record is made up of an integral number of blocks, and this operation of putting many disk blocks into a single tape block is called reblocking, or more simply, blocking. The term logical record refers to the logical organization of many characters into something meaningful to the application. The term unit record describes a small set of characters which are transmitted whole to or by the application, and often refers to a line of text. Those two last terms are unrelated to what we call a record in GNU tar.

When writing to tapes, tar writes the contents of the archive in chunks known as records. To change the default blocking factor, use the ‘--blocking-factor=512-size’ (‘-b 512-size’) option. Each record will then be composed of 512-size blocks. (Each tar block is 512 bytes. See section Basic Tar Format.) Each file written to the archive uses at least one full record. As a result, using a larger record size can result in more wasted space for small files. On the other hand, a larger record size can often be read and written much more efficiently.

Further complicating the problem is that some tape drives ignore the blocking entirely. For these, a larger record size can still improve performance (because the software layers above the tape drive still honor the blocking), but not as dramatically as on tape drives that honor blocking.

When reading an archive, tar can usually figure out the record size on itself. When this is the case, and a non-standard record size was used when the archive was created, tar will print a message about a non-standard blocking factor, and then operate normally(26). On some tape devices, however, tar cannot figure out the record size itself. On most of those, you can specify a blocking factor (with ‘--blocking-factor’) larger than the actual blocking factor, and then use the ‘--read-full-records’ (‘-B’) option. (If you specify a blocking factor with ‘--blocking-factor’ and don’t use the ‘--read-full-records’ option, then tar will not attempt to figure out the recording size itself.) On some devices, you must always specify the record size exactly with ‘--blocking-factor’ when reading, because tar cannot figure it out. In any case, use ‘--list’ (‘-t’) before doing any extractions to see whether tar is reading the archive correctly.

tar blocks are all fixed size (512 bytes), and its scheme for putting them into records is to put a whole number of them (one or more) into each record. tar records are all the same size; at the end of the file there’s a block containing all zeros, which is how you tell that the remainder of the last record(s) are garbage.

In a standard tar file (no options), the block size is 512 and the record size is 10240, for a blocking factor of 20. What the ‘--blocking-factor’ option does is sets the blocking factor, changing the record size while leaving the block size at 512 bytes. 20 was fine for ancient 800 or 1600 bpi reel-to-reel tape drives; most tape drives these days prefer much bigger records in order to stream and not waste tape. When writing tapes for myself, some tend to use a factor of the order of 2048, say, giving a record size of around one megabyte.

If you use a blocking factor larger than 20, older tar programs might not be able to read the archive, so we recommend this as a limit to use in practice. GNU tar, however, will support arbitrarily large record sizes, limited only by the amount of virtual memory or the physical characteristics of the tape device.

9.4.1 Format Variations

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Format parameters specify how an archive is written on the archive media. The best choice of format parameters will vary depending on the type and number of files being archived, and on the media used to store the archive.

To specify format parameters when accessing or creating an archive, you can use the options described in the following sections. If you do not specify any format parameters, tar uses default parameters. You cannot modify a compressed archive. If you create an archive with the ‘--blocking-factor’ option specified (see section The Blocking Factor of an Archive), you must specify that blocking-factor when operating on the archive. See section Controlling the Archive Format, for other examples of format parameter considerations.

9.4.2 The Blocking Factor of an Archive

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The data in an archive is grouped into blocks, which are 512 bytes. Blocks are read and written in whole number multiples called records. The number of blocks in a record (i.e., the size of a record in units of 512 bytes) is called the blocking factor. The ‘--blocking-factor=512-size’ (‘-b 512-size’) option specifies the blocking factor of an archive. The default blocking factor is typically 20 (i.e., 10240 bytes), but can be specified at installation. To find out the blocking factor of an existing archive, use ‘tar --list --file=archive-name’. This may not work on some devices.

Records are separated by gaps, which waste space on the archive media. If you are archiving on magnetic tape, using a larger blocking factor (and therefore larger records) provides faster throughput and allows you to fit more data on a tape (because there are fewer gaps). If you are archiving on cartridge, a very large blocking factor (say 126 or more) greatly increases performance. A smaller blocking factor, on the other hand, may be useful when archiving small files, to avoid archiving lots of nulls as tar fills out the archive to the end of the record. In general, the ideal record size depends on the size of the inter-record gaps on the tape you are using, and the average size of the files you are archiving. See section How to Create Archives, for information on writing archives.

Archives with blocking factors larger than 20 cannot be read by very old versions of tar, or by some newer versions of tar running on old machines with small address spaces. With GNU tar, the blocking factor of an archive is limited only by the maximum record size of the device containing the archive, or by the amount of available virtual memory.

Also, on some systems, not using adequate blocking factors, as sometimes imposed by the device drivers, may yield unexpected diagnostics. For example, this has been reported:

Cannot write to /dev/dlt: Invalid argument

In such cases, it sometimes happen that the tar bundled by the system is aware of block size idiosyncrasies, while GNU tar requires an explicit specification for the block size, which it cannot guess. This yields some people to consider GNU tar is misbehaving, because by comparison, the bundle tar works OK. Adding -b 256, for example, might resolve the problem.

If you use a non-default blocking factor when you create an archive, you must specify the same blocking factor when you modify that archive. Some archive devices will also require you to specify the blocking factor when reading that archive, however this is not typically the case. Usually, you can use ‘--list’ (‘-t’) without specifying a blocking factor—tar reports a non-default record size and then lists the archive members as it would normally. To extract files from an archive with a non-standard blocking factor (particularly if you’re not sure what the blocking factor is), you can usually use the ‘--read-full-records’ (‘-B’) option while specifying a blocking factor larger then the blocking factor of the archive (i.e., ‘tar --extract --read-full-records --blocking-factor=300’). See section How to List Archives, for more information on the ‘--list’ (‘-t’) operation. See section Options to Help Read Archives, for a more detailed explanation of that option.

‘--blocking-factor=number’

‘-b number’

Specifies the blocking factor of an archive. Can be used with any operation, but is usually not necessary with ‘--list’ (‘-t’).

Device blocking

‘-b blocks’

‘--blocking-factor=blocks’

Set record size to blocks*512 bytes.

This option is used to specify a blocking factor for the archive. When reading or writing the archive, tar, will do reads and writes of the archive in records of block*512 bytes. This is true even when the archive is compressed. Some devices requires that all write operations be a multiple of a certain size, and so, tar pads the archive out to the next record boundary.

The default blocking factor is set when tar is compiled, and is typically 20. Blocking factors larger than 20 cannot be read by very old versions of tar, or by some newer versions of tar running on old machines with small address spaces.

With a magnetic tape, larger records give faster throughput and fit more data on a tape (because there are fewer inter-record gaps). If the archive is in a disk file or a pipe, you may want to specify a smaller blocking factor, since a large one will result in a large number of null bytes at the end of the archive.

When writing cartridge or other streaming tapes, a much larger blocking factor (say 126 or more) will greatly increase performance. However, you must specify the same blocking factor when reading or updating the archive.

Apparently, Exabyte drives have a physical block size of 8K bytes. If we choose our blocksize as a multiple of 8k bytes, then the problem seems to disappear. Id est, we are using block size of 112 right now, and we haven’t had the problem since we switched…

With GNU tar the blocking factor is limited only by the maximum record size of the device containing the archive, or by the amount of available virtual memory.

However, deblocking or reblocking is virtually avoided in a special case which often occurs in practice, but which requires all the following conditions to be simultaneously true:

• the archive is subject to a compression option,
• the archive is not handled through standard input or output, nor redirected nor piped,
• the archive is directly handled to a local disk, instead of any special device,
• ‘--blocking-factor’ is not explicitly specified on the tar invocation.

If the output goes directly to a local disk, and not through stdout, then the last write is not extended to a full record size. Otherwise, reblocking occurs. Here are a few other remarks on this topic:

• gzip will complain about trailing garbage if asked to uncompress a compressed archive on tape, there is an option to turn the message off, but it breaks the regularity of simply having to use ‘prog -d’ for decompression. It would be nice if gzip was silently ignoring any number of trailing zeros. I’ll ask Jean-loup Gailly, by sending a copy of this message to him.
• compress does not show this problem, but as Jean-loup pointed out to Michael, ‘compress -d’ silently adds garbage after the result of decompression, which tar ignores because it already recognized its end-of-file indicator. So this bug may be safely ignored.
• ‘gzip -d -q’ will be silent about the trailing zeros indeed, but will still return an exit status of 2 which tar reports in turn. tar might ignore the exit status returned, but I hate doing that, as it weakens the protection tar offers users against other possible problems at decompression time. If gzip was silently skipping trailing zeros and also avoiding setting the exit status in this innocuous case, that would solve this situation.
• tar should become more solid at not stopping to read a pipe at the first null block encountered. This inelegantly breaks the pipe. tar should rather drain the pipe out before exiting itself.

‘-i’

‘--ignore-zeros’

Ignore blocks of zeros in archive (means EOF).

The ‘--ignore-zeros’ (‘-i’) option causes tar to ignore blocks of zeros in the archive. Normally a block of zeros indicates the end of the archive, but when reading a damaged archive, or one which was created by concatenating several archives together, this option allows tar to read the entire archive. This option is not on by default because many versions of tar write garbage after the zeroed blocks.

Note that this option causes tar to read to the end of the archive file, which may sometimes avoid problems when multiple files are stored on a single physical tape.

‘-B’

‘--read-full-records’

Reblock as we read (for reading 4.2BSD pipes).

If ‘--read-full-records’ is used, tar will not panic if an attempt to read a record from the archive does not return a full record. Instead, tar will keep reading until it has obtained a full record.

This option is turned on by default when tar is reading an archive from standard input, or from a remote machine. This is because on BSD Unix systems, a read of a pipe will return however much happens to be in the pipe, even if it is less than tar requested. If this option was not used, tar would fail as soon as it read an incomplete record from the pipe.

This option is also useful with the commands for updating an archive.

Tape blocking

When handling various tapes or cartridges, you have to take care of selecting a proper blocking, that is, the number of disk blocks you put together as a single tape block on the tape, without intervening tape gaps. A tape gap is a small landing area on the tape with no information on it, used for decelerating the tape to a full stop, and for later regaining the reading or writing speed. When the tape driver starts reading a record, the record has to be read whole without stopping, as a tape gap is needed to stop the tape motion without losing information.

Using higher blocking (putting more disk blocks per tape block) will use the tape more efficiently as there will be less tape gaps. But reading such tapes may be more difficult for the system, as more memory will be required to receive at once the whole record. Further, if there is a reading error on a huge record, this is less likely that the system will succeed in recovering the information. So, blocking should not be too low, nor it should be too high. tar uses by default a blocking of 20 for historical reasons, and it does not really matter when reading or writing to disk. Current tape technology would easily accommodate higher blockings. Sun recommends a blocking of 126 for Exabytes and 96 for DATs. We were told that for some DLT drives, the blocking should be a multiple of 4Kb, preferably 64Kb (-b 128) or 256 for decent performance. Other manufacturers may use different recommendations for the same tapes. This might also depends of the buffering techniques used inside modern tape controllers. Some imposes a minimum blocking, or a maximum blocking. Others request blocking to be some exponent of two.

So, there is no fixed rule for blocking. But blocking at read time should ideally be the same as blocking used at write time. At one place I know, with a wide variety of equipment, they found it best to use a blocking of 32 to guarantee that their tapes are fully interchangeable.

I was also told that, for recycled tapes, prior erasure (by the same drive unit that will be used to create the archives) sometimes lowers the error rates observed at rewriting time.

I might also use ‘--number-blocks’ instead of ‘--block-number’, so ‘--block’ will then expand to ‘--blocking-factor’ unambiguously.

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