On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 18:51 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On 7/31/06, Roger Oberholtzer <roger@opq.se> wrote:
Of course hot swapping SATA disks is not currently supported in Linux. As such, udevmonitor reports nothing when the disks are inserted or removed on a system that does support this at the hardware level. There is work in libata, but nothing functioning for use in a production system.
Not sure how "production" you need it to be.
The 2.6.17 kernel has been out for a couple months I think.
Wonder if it works with intel chipsets (ahci). I installed 2.6.17.7, and still did not see udev activity. Maybe it is only working for certain chip sets. Not much in the Docs in the kernel source. Oh well. Back to plan A: a script. Any suggestions on the best way to get the system to rescan for sata drives? I used to have something that used /proc/scsi. But isn't that going away?
There is a stable libata patch to add hotswap capability to it. It still has a nasty experimental warning I think in the readme, but in the several months it has been out, there really have been very few issues and none I recall caused data loss. I would definately consider it.
The patch is also in 2.6.18-rc3, but that I too would stay away from. Not because I don't trust the patch, it is the rest of 2.6.18-rc3 I would worry about.
Quoting the July 10 announcement e-mail:
Updated version available.
Link resume handling in the previous version was broken causing libata to ignore hotplug event after a link has been hot-unplugged. Fixed.
A few other hotplug related problems are fixed.
I expect this version to have well-behaving PMP and hotplug support. If anything seems weird, please report.
More info can be found at the following URL.
http://home-tj.org/wiki/index.php/Libata-tj-stable
Updated patches against v2.6.17.4 are at the following URL.
http://home-tj.org/files/libata-tj-stable/libata-tj-2.6.17.4-20060710.tar.bz...
So, what would be the next best thing? I assume I would need to do a script that handles un-mounting the disks, and then a rescan of the devices. And then a re-mount.. I remember doing this way back with SCSI devices. But perhaps there is a best way to scan for SATA devices?
The tricky bit is that I have 4 SATA disks that will sort of work in sets. And the user will probably want to pop in one in the set when looking for something.
I do seem to be rambling a bit, but it is because I can't decide the best approach.
-- Roger Oberholtzer
OPQ Systems AB Ramböll Sverige AB Kapellgränd 7 P.O. Box 4205 SE-102 65 Stockholm, Sweden
Tel: Int +46 8-615 60 20 Fax: Int +46 8-31 42 23
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-- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century
-- Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems AB Ramböll Sverige AB Kapellgränd 7 P.O. Box 4205 SE-102 65 Stockholm, Sweden Tel: Int +46 8-615 60 20 Fax: Int +46 8-31 42 23