Disconnect fighting stupid devices

Michael K. Johnson (johnsonm@nigel.vnet.net)
Tue, 09 Apr 1996 17:02:00 -0400

I think I've figured out exactly what my problem is with talking to
my scanner causing ext2 panics. My scanner is rather trigger-happy
causing aborts, which kill commands that are currently on my hard
drive's queue. This trickles up to ext2, which panics.

Unfortunately, the 53c{7,8}xx driver doesn't allow me to use the
/proc/scsi interface to disable disconnection. What I'm thinking
of doing to make it more stable is refuse to run if there are any
devices on the same host/channel which have disconnection turned
on, unless the driver has permission to turn disconnection off
for that channel/all devices on that channel. If it did turn
disconnection off, it would turn it on again when it was done
except in the case of failure.

What's my point? A standard interface for /proc/scsi so that
I could do this without special-case code would be really nice.
It would be even nicer if it were available for the next stable
release, but I'm guessing that might not be an option...

Any opinions or advice?

It has just occured to me that this might be useful to the people
whose SCSI tapes are wrecking their backups from SCSI disks...

michaelkjohnson