[TUHS] mag tapes

[Dan Cross via TUHS]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 4:50 PM Ron Natalie via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> Obviously, getting it off the physical media is key.   Once you have the
> raw records decoding the CPIO is pretty trivial.   Hell, my Mac even has
> cpio on it (haven’t used that in years).
> [snip]

cpio remains surprisingly relevant in the modern age; I believe the
Linux initramfs is a cpio archive, and I know for sure that Oxide
machines read a compressed cpio archive out of flash containing the
kernel image that initializes our machines (I know because I wrote the
code that reads the archive, loads and maps the kernel, and jumps into
it to initialize the world; we pull a ramdisk image for the root
filesystem off of an NVMe device once we've initialized the PCIe
subsystem and kicked off link training and so forth).

        - Dan C.