sg3_utils port, version 1.19 beta

[Douglas Gilbert]

sg3_utils is a package of command line utilities,
most of which are closely associated with a SCSI
command. For example, sg_persist issues PERSISTENT
RESERVE IN and OUT SCSI commands. Some utilities
are just slightly higher level: sg_ses fetches
status pages and can send control pages to a SES device.

camcontrol can issue SCSI commands in FreeBSD, but that
can become a chore when there is a lot of data to set up
or decode. Some sg3_utils utilities do a lot of work
decoding the response to SCSI commands (e.g.
"sg_get_config /dev/cd0" will decode MMC features and
profiles of the drive and media).

The sg3_utils port to FreeBSD contains 20 utilities,
each with a man page. Linux specific and some other
utilities that require more work have been dropped from
this initial FreeBSD port. A tarball of sg3_utils 1.19
beta can be found at:
http://www.torque.net/sg  [in the news section]
Here is a web page with an overview of sg3_utils:
http://www.torque.net/sg/u_index.html

See the README.freebsd and INSTALL files in the tarball
for more information.

The sg3_utils FreeBSD port uses the same pass through
mechanism as sdparm which I released earlier this week
to this list. The only response to date has been the
automatically generated "out of office" variety :-)

Doug Gilbert