Since I've spent some time looking at bacula's and mt's source code to figure out why just bacula was barfing on an empty tape drive on a 2.6.x linux kernel, I think it might be worth adding the following to the FAQ. (Apologies if something similar is in the docs already..I did look but found nothing relevant).
Note: I stumbled upon this issue while configuring bacula 1.36.2 on a 2.6.x based system on an IBM 4560SLX tape library. thanks for all your work, Michele Baldessari * Bacula, kernel 2.6.x and SCSI hangs when tape drive is empty Bacula 1.36.x does not open the device with O_NONBLOCK and thus isn't able to cope with the kernel change in the st driver [1]. The solution is either to upgrade bacula to a 1.37.x version or to use a 2.4.x kernel. [1] http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0302.2/0066.html : """ The open() behaviour of st was changed at 2.5.3 to conform with SUS (blocking) and what the other Unices do (timeout). If the device is opened without O_NONBLOCK, the driver waits for some time (default 2 minutes) for the device to become ready. If it does not become ready, an error is returned. """
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