I seriously question the value of having this bloat up the kernel and general purpose filesystems. Tapes work just fine with userspace support and there isn't a

I seriously question the value of having this bloat up the kernel and general purpose filesystems. Tapes work just fine with userspace support and there isn't any reason for not having custom FUSE's for this as well. Put another way, everyone suffers with code bloat and extra complexity for the tiny percentage of users (which are large, and can manage their own systems) this supports. Edit: The SMR drives should just support the SCSI streaming command set and be done with it. That way nothing really needs to change anywhere but in the drive firmware.