Bug 48301 – New 2.6 drivers don't work because they don't have DEVFS support (eg. SCSI drivers for the LSI sym53c8xx)

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Release Media

[Description Sapan Bhatia 2004-04-19 02:13:49 UTC]

The kernel used in Gentoo 2004.0 is 2.6, and is compiled with devfs. devfs is deprecated in kernel 2.6, and so several drivers, such as the LSI sym53c8xx-2 are written to use the traditional /dev file system - i.e., they don't have devfs support. 

So, basically, any system with any such hardware (eg. all Dell PowerEdge servers) cannot be installed.

Recommendations: 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot from livecd on such a system
2. modprobe pertinent module
3. check /dev/sd?

Actual Results:  
the scsi device files (/dev/scsi/* and /dev/sd*) don't exist, because the driver 
hasn't called devfs_register - because it hasn't been written to call it.

Expected Results:  
IF 2.6 is being used during installation, devfs MUST be left out.

[Comment 1 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2004-05-18 13:11:45 UTC]

We need to have proper udev support in genkernel before we can make a CD without devfs support.

[Comment 2 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2004-11-23 17:00:11 UTC]

I'm willing to bet that I can RESOLVE this with the release of 2004.3... right?

[Comment 3 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2004-12-06 14:50:17 UTC]

2004.3 has come and gone... no word... I'm betting this is closed since we aren't even using devfs anymore.