Re: [Bug 80711] [PATCH]SG_FLAG_LUN_INHIBIT is no longer implemented and there's not way to prevent the kernel from using the 2nd cdb byte for the LUN

James Bottomley
2014-08-25T19:39:09Z

On Mon, 2014-08-25 at 10:44 -0400, Alan Stern wrote:

> James, can you explain how the INQUIRY command in scsi_probe_lun()
> managed to work back in the days when multi-lun SCSI-2 devices were
> common? sdev->scsi_level doesn't get set when sdev is allocated, so it
> initially contains 0, so the LUN bits won't get filled in when the
> first INQUIRY command is sent. Then how could the target know which
> logical unit the INQUIRY was meant for?

Best guess, some patches over the course of time altered the way we do
this and no-one noticed. I think it was probably the introduction of
the unknown SCSI data level that caused the breakage.

Historically, the LUN in CMD bits is left over from SCSI-1; it was
incorporated into SCSI-2 for backward compatibility (even though SCSI-2
moved the LUN specification to the identify message). In SCSI-3 and
beyond, those bits were obsoleted and transports took sole
responsibility for LUN handling. I'm fairly certain all the SCSI-1
devices relying on this behaviour have long ago migrated to the great
data centre in the sky.

Alan's fix looks reasonable because we probe LUN 0 first (for SCSI-1 and
2 which has parallel scanning), which is why it doesn't matter (the bits
are set to zero) and once we have LUN 0 we propagate the data to the
target and make it the basis for future checks. I'd like to see a
comment explaining this in the code, though ...
James