Problems with ide-scsi in 2.3.xx

Brian Capouch (brianc@palaver.net)
Sun, 05 Dec 1999 14:56:31 -0500


I'm not at the level of being able to fix stuff, but I can report it,
and since my understanding is that we're moving towards 2.4 and cleaning
up the 2.3 kernel stuff, I wanted to be sure to get this out and into
things.

With 2.3.?, it has no longer been possible to have the kernel recognize
an IDE CD as a SCSI device through kernel options (i.e.
"append=hdd=ide-scsi") which works just fine in the 2.2 set. The advice
out there in Netland is to disable the regular IDE CDROM drivers
entirely, enable the ide-scsi option in the kernel, and let the kernel
map CD drives to scsi devices.

I have two CD drives in my system, which under 2.2 I use the above trick
to map the R/W drive to SCSI (required for cdrecord) and leave the other
one as and IDE, getting at it with /dev/hdx. Things work splendidly
this way.

On the new kernels, when I let both drives become SCSI, things get nasty
in a hurry. Attempts to copy CD data onto the hard drive result in a
hard system lockup (no panics or messages logged) and the CD recording
software also goes bonkers, getting all kids of SCSI errors during
writes that make the whole process impossible.

I only have these two IDE drives, but have seen reported that if one has
an IDE CD drive and a genuine SCSI things are OK; the radical behavior
is apparently triggered by the ide-scsi driver when it has to map
multiple IDE devices into the SCSI chain.

Just wanted to get this out here. Sorry if it is noise.

B.

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