Debian Sarge vs. USB

[Bruce Dawson]

Thanks all for replying to this.

It turns out the answer was a bit different than anticipated.

Debian Sarge (and its 2.6.10 kernel) is moving to a different way of
handling /dev and the myriad major and minor device numbers. It also
seems to be moving to a new way of handling hotplug: hal instead of
devlabel. 

My problem was that I had a mixture of the old and new /dev and hotplug.
Evidently, the new way is to use sysfs to identify devices, and then
mount then (by UUID or whatever) in /.dev (which is mapped to /dev). As
a result, my usb storage devices are getting
assigned /dev/uba, /dev/ubb, ... And hal is *supposed* to take care of
using the right device when you say, for instance, 'mount /thumbdrive'

I'm still learning about all this, so I don't have it working cleanly
yet. But at least I can mount it using the old way
(mount /dev/uba1 /mnt/thumbpartition1). But one thing is evident - the
scsi (or even usb-storage) modules are no longer needed for accessing
USB storage devices.

I just wanted to let people know this (that the device world appears to
be changing).

--Bruce

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 11:26 -0500, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Feb 2005, at 10:24am, jbd at codemeta.com wrote:
> > The not loading as SCSI is what confused me, but I read something
> > somewhere that said the new USB wasn't using SCSI anymore ...
> 
>   There is a new USB device driver in recent kernels that provides reduced
> block device functionality.  I forget the proper term.  It came into being
> because there are a lot of really cheap and really brain damaged USB "flash
> drives" on the market that don't implement the spec fully/properly.  The
> "regular" driver that made things appear as /dev/sda1 (or whatever) chokes
> when it tries to talk to such broken hardware.  This alternate driver tries
> to speak slowly and use small words to work around such issues.  The "real"
> driver should still be available; it is not being phased out, IIRC.
> 
>   I forget the rest of the details, but this will hopefully provide some
> insight.
> 
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