[sane-devel] XSANE ... hotplug & 'mail image' probs.

[Bertrik Sikken]

Henning Meier-Geinitz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 08:48:26AM +0200, Bertrik Sikken wrote:
> 
>>In the 2.6.x range of kernels there is a weird issue (=bug?), i.e.
>>there is a race between the hotplug event and the creation of the
>>libusb 'device file' (in /proc/bus/usb).
> 
> 
> Uh, really? That makes the whole idea of hot-plug void. It hasn't
> happened for me, as far as I remember?
> 
> 
>>The libusbscanner hotplug script does not take this into account
>>so it may happen sometimes that the script tries to update permission
>>for a file that doesn't exist yet.
>>As far as I know, this race will be looked at in the next kernel
>>series,
> 
> 
> So the fix will be there in 2 or three years? Strange.

Yes, there really is a problem, but it may have been fixed in the
some of the 'generic' hotplug scripts already (I noticed a couple
of sleeps here and there in usb.agent and usb.rc on my MDK10.1
system).
I definitely had this problem earlier (with just about every USB
device, scanner/minidisc/pendrive), but when I tried to reproduce
it a moment ago but I didn't run into it anymore. So maybe I was
a little paranoid.

Here's a thread from linux-hotplug-devel that discusses the problem:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-hotplug-devel&m=108034761409426&w=2
(cut and paste it together if the link wraps)

>>but for now you can use a dirty hack like a 'sleep 1' at the top of
>>the hotplug script.
> 
> 
> Should we use that? Or is there a less ugly way e.g. by checking if
> the device file is already there?

I'm not sure. Maybe it has really been 'fixed' in the latest hotplug
package, in which case I think we need to know the exact version in
which it was fixed.
Instead of a sleep we could also use a loop to wait for the device
(even uglier?).

BTW I noticed that the cvs version of sane now has a work-around
(by Jochen Eisinger) claiming
"# latest hotplug doesn't set DEVICE on 2.6.x kernels"
I think this observation is also caused by a hotplug race.

Regards,
Bertrik