SCSI Tools for Debian notes --------------------------- scsiinfo: --------- Comes both with text interface and advanced X interface. Textmode usage with "scsiinfo". X-Startup with "scsi-config", but you must have wish installed to make it work. -- Christoph Lameter scsitools is a fork of hwtools previously maintained by Christoph Lameter (in 1996-1997) & Josip Rodin and Robert Woodcock acting on behalf of the Debian QA Team (in 1999). It was needed to open the SCSI tools provided by hwtools to other Debian architectures than i386 (in effect, hwtools is a collection of tools mainly designed for i386). scsidev & /dev/scsi: -------------------- /dev/scsi directory is now supported on 2.2 kernels through a set of init scripts. Even the root partition could use /dev/scsi notation but the kernel should support ramdisk compiled in this case. Populating /dev/scsi is done in 2 steps: 1. in S09scsitools-pre.sh, before remounting / rw, a ramdisk is set up, mounted on /dev/scsi and filled in according to /etc/scsi.alias. This way, further references to /dev/scsi could be made, even for root and swap partitions. 2. in S20scsitools.sh, the ramdisk is freed and the real /dev/scsi refilled accordingly. If you switch on a SCSI device after the boot up sequence, you can run /etc/init.d/scsitools.sh restart to rescan the SCSI chain. It uses the rescan-scsi-bus script which is based on add-single-device feature of the Linux SCSI driver. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * CAUTION: This is not for hotplugging your peripherals. As SCSI was not designed for this you could damage your hardware! However perhaps it is legal to switch on an already connected device. It is perhaps not guaranteed this device doesn't corrupt an ongoing data transfer. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Furthermore, this feature does not work very well with all SCSI host adapters. Some Linux SCSI drivers do not acknowledge the removal of a peripheral when using the remove-single-device feature. In such kind of driver, the low level directly maintains a cache of available peripherals but there is no communication with the mid level when removing a peripheral, so the low level still think the device is alive and, at the time rescan-scsi-bus check for its removal, the kernel is displaying indefinitely a message like this one: esp0: Warning, live target 4 not responding to selection. This bug was discovered during the test of scsitools in the ESP100 driver (sparc) on 2.2 kernels. I wrote a fix for it and reported it upstream (to the linux-sparc mailing list). It is provided here in kernel-source-2.2.14.espfix file. The way it works is generic by adding a revoke function call to the mid level driver to tell the low level that the peripheral was removed, but this revoke function have to be written for all problematic low level drivers. Note that this bug could also exist for NCR5380 and NCR53C9x drivers at least, since they are based on the same design than the Sparc ESP one. -- Eric Delaunay