YDL2.3, Xserve, and firewire

[Tim Seufert]

On Wednesday, February 26, 2003, at 04:37  AM, Michael George wrote:

> Has anyone gotten the firewire port to work on the Xserve running 2.3? 
>  I've rebuilt the kernel with several types of interfaces compiled in, 
> but nothing happens when I plug in a firewire drive and power it up.

Are you sure nothing really happens?  What (if any) system log messages 
do you get when you hotplug a disk?  If you have the proper drivers 
compiled in (or loaded if they're compiled as modules), the Firewire 
subsystem should at least see a device showing up on the bus... and if 
the SBP-2 driver for Firewire disks is loaded it should find the drive 
and "log in" to it.

The reason I ask if you're sure is because as of the last time I used 
it, the Linux firewire subsystem didn't have fully automatic handling 
of device hotplug.  In the case of hard drives, the kernel drivers will 
know something is there, but to actually use it you must rescan the 
SBP-2 virtual SCSI bus (Firewire drives show up as SCSI devices because 
SBP-2 is basically a form of SCSI) and then mount the drive after it 
has been registered by the rescan.

Rescanning SCSI busses is done by fiddling with /proc stuff.  There's a 
nifty shell script floating out there on the Net which automatically 
finds all busses (including the virtual one that the Firewire drivers 
register) and rescans them; google for "rescan-scsi-bus.sh".