Re: letting glabel recognise a media change

Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 08:46:11PM +0300, Alexander Motin wrote:
>> Andriy Gapon wrote:
>>> on 30/09/2010 01:28 Matthew Jacob said the following:
>>>> If something like that was in place, I assure you that things would start to use
>>>> it very quickly.
>>> I am not sure about this.
>>> Because, e.g. I don't see an easy way to know that media is changed in scsi_cd
>>> driver.  That is, without polling.  I don't consider polling to be an easy way for
>>> a number of reasons.
>> SATA specification defines concept of Asynchronous Notification. It is
>> already used by port multipliers to report about PHY events. It is also
>> supposed to be used by CD drives to report media change. I haven't seen
>> such devices yet, but hope they may appear sometimes.
>>
>> And even without AN support it would be nice to implement proper
>> handling for SCSI "UA - media changed" errors within CAM. It still won't
>> be perfect without using polling, but probably still something.
> 
> I'd like to know the original reason why CD device is represented by
> GEOM provider and not CD media. For my naive thinking CD media should be
> GEOM provider that we taste once the media is inserted and orphan once
> the media is removed. I don't see any reasons for CD device to be useful
> GEOM provider, but maybe I'm overlooking something.
> 
> Poul-Henning or Soren, do you remember who made and why this design choice?

SCSI drivers receive no notification on media insertion. Somebody should
poll device. At this moment it is handled by consumers. Indeed not sure
it is the best idea. If we want driver to bother with this polling - we
may do as you propose. Actually in sdhci(4) driver I am doing this way -
mmcsdX device appears when card inserted and disappears on removal.

I think first thing that may brake if there will be no cdX device -
loading the media with some commands. Also it may be non-intuitive that
drive is present, but disk is not registered in GEOM.

-- 
Alexander Motin