RE: SCSI Tapes and devfs

[Borzenkov Andrey <Andrey.Borzenkov@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> Okay, then what is supposed to tell devfs that there is
> now a scsi tape drive/changer ready to use.

This is the sole responsibility of corresponding driver. If we speak about
SCSI tape, this happens in driver attach method.

 In the case
> of st being a module and me loading it at startup time
> causes devfs to see it.  But what SHOULD trigger this if
> the st support is built into a kernel - what is the
> mechanism there for Linux?
> 

The same modulo bugs. St's attach should run in exactly the same fashion and
register tape (if found). Are you sure you have not built driver for your
SCSI adapter as module? Then when st is initialized at boot time it can't
find any tapes because there is no adapter yet. This would perfectly explain
why tape was not there initially but appeared later (due to module
autoloading).

-andrey