README for sg3_utils ==================== Introduction ============ This package contains low level utilities for devices that use a SCSI command set. Apart from SCSI parallel interface (SPI) devices, the SCSI command set is used by ATAPI devices (CD/DVDs and tapes), USB mass storage devices, Fibre Channel disks, IEEE 1394 storage devices (that use the "SBP" protocol), SAS, iSCSI and FCoE devices (amongst others). This package originally targeted the Linux SCSI subsystem. Since most operating systems contain a SCSI command pass-through mechanism, many utilities within this package have been ported. This README mainly concentrates on Linux: see the README.freebsd file for the FreeBSD port, README.solaris for the Solaris port, the README.tru64 file for the Tru64 (OSF) port and README.win32 for the Windows ports (of which there are two). Most utilities within the sg3_utils package work at the SCSI command level. For example the sg_inq utility issues a SCSI INQUIRY command and decodes the response. The COVERAGE file has a table containing a row for each SCSI command issued by this package; to the right of each row is the utility (sometimes more than one) that issue that SCSI command. The COVERAGE file has a second table for ATA commands issude. Some utilities interface at a slightly higher level, for example: sg_dd, sgm_dd and sgp_dd. These are closely related to the Unix dd command and typically issue a sequence of SCSI READ and WRITE commands to copy data. These utilities are relatively tightly bound to Linux and are not ported to other Operating Systems. A new utility called ddpt (in a package of the same name) is more generic while still allowing a copy to be done in terms of SCSI READ and WRITE commands. ddpt has been ported to other OSes. Description =========== A web site supporting the sg3_utils package can be found at http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html . That page has a table of released versions for download. The most recent release or beta of sg3_utils may be found on this page: http://sg.danny.cz/sg in the News section. The predecessor to this package was called sg_utils. It is described in http://sg.danny.cz/sg/uu_index.html and old versions can be downloaded from the Downloads section of http://sg.danny.cz/sg . In the Linux 2.4 kernel series these utilities need to use the SCSI generic (sg) driver to access SCSI devices. The name of this package (i.e. sg3_utils) refers to version 3 of the SCSI generic (sg) driver which was introduced at the beginning of the 2.4 Linux kernel series. Significantly this added a new SCSI command interface structure (i.e. struct sg_io_hdr) that is more flexible than the older "sg_header" structure found in the sg driver in the 2.2 and earlier Linux kernel series. The sg_io_hdr structure is also more flexible than the awkward (and limiting) interface to the SCSI_IOCTL_SEND_COMMAND ioctl supported by the Linux SCSI mid level. The version 3 sg driver also added the SG_IO ioctl that is synchronous (i.e. it issues the requested SCSI command and waits for the response (or a timeout) before the ioctl returns to the user space program that invoked it). The SG_IO ioctl is now supported in other parts of the Linux kernel in the 2.6 series. In sg3_utils version 1.27 support has been added for the Linux bsg driver which use the sg version 4 interface. There seems no point in renaming this package sg4_utils. The existing utilities just silently support either. Cuurently the source build must be able to see the /usr/include/linux/bsg.h file. Then at run time the /proc/devices pseudo file needs to have an entry for the bsg driver (appeared around lk 2.6.28). With this in place each utility at run time checks the device it has been given and if it is a char device whose major number matches the bsg entry in /proc/devices then the sg v4 interface is used. Otherwise the sg v3 interface is used. Utilities that wish to use the asynchronous SCSI command interface (i.e. via a write() read() sequence) or issue special "commands" (e.g. bus and device resets) still need to use the Linux sg driver. Note that various drivers (e.g. cdrom/sr) have different open() flag and permissions policies that the user may need to take into account. If users have problems or questions about them please contact the author. Documentation for the Linux sg device driver can be found at: http://sg.danny.cz/sg/p/sg_v3_ho.html . This is written in DocBook and the original xml can be found in the same directory with the ".xml" extension. Postscript and pdf renderings are also in that directory. Older documentation for the sg version 3 driver can be found at: http://sg.danny.cz/sg/p/scsi_generic_v3.txt . All utilities are either "GPL"-ed or have a FreeBSD license. The author's intention is that users may incorporate all or part of the code in their work as they please. Attribution is encouraged. Please check the code as other contributors (apart from the author) may also have copyright notices. For a list of contributors see the CREDITS file. To save the repetition of common code (e.g. SCSI error processing) and reduce the size of the executable files, a shared library called libsgutils.so (its Linux name) is created during the build process. That library is built from the contents of the include and lib subdirectories. The header files in the include subdirectory can be seen as the API of libsgutils and are commented with that in mind. The SCSI pass-through code for the supported operating systems is found in the lib subdirectory with names like sg_pt_linux.c and sg_pt_win32.c . All the utilities in the src subdirectory have "man" pages that are placed in the doc subdirectory. There is also a sg3_utils (8) man page that summarizes common facilities including exit statuses. Additional information (including each utility's version number) can be found towards the top of each ".c" file corresponding to the utility name. The sg driver in Linux can be seen as having 3 distinct versions: v1 lk < 2.2.6 sg_header based relatively unchanged since 1992 v2 lk >= 2.2.6 enhanced sg_header interface structure [1999/4/16] v3 lk >= 2.4 additional sg_io_hdr interface structure [2001/1/4] v3 lk >= 2.6 same interface as found in lk 2.4 [2.6.0: 2003/12/18] and the bsg driver supports the sg v4 interface and was added around lk 2.6.28 . This package is targeted at "v3" and "v4". Another package called "sg_utils" is targeted at "v2" and to a lesser extent "v1". The "sg_utils" package has a subset of the utilities found in this package. In Linux some sg driver ioctls (notably SG_IO) are defined for many block devices in lk 2.6 series. In practice this means all SCSI block devices, ATAPI block devices (mainly CD, DVD and BD optical devices) but _not_ ATA disks, depending on which kernel configuration options, can be accessed by the utilities in this package. SATA disks that use the libata kernel library (or some other SCSI to ATA Translation (SAT) Layer (SATL)) accept SCSI commands and thus are supported. Support for the SG_IO as been added to the scsi tape driver (st) in lk 2.6.6 . In the src directory the bulk of the utilities are written in relatively clean POSIX compliant C code with Linux specific system calls and structures removed and placed in linux specific files in the lib directory. A small number of utilities in the src directory do contain Linux specific logic and are not ported to other OSes (e.g. sg_dd). One utility, sg_scan, has two separate implementations, one for Linux (sg_scan.c.linux) and one for Windows (sg_scan.c.win32). The src-lib directory split approach allows FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64 and Windows specific code to be isolated to a few files in the lib directory whose interfaces match those of the Linux specific code. Darwin is not supported because the Apple folks do not want to give their users a pass-through SCSI interface. The author has read about creative hackers using a VM containing a real OS to circumvent the Apple restriction. Building ======== This package is designed to be built with the usual: "./configure ; make ; make install" sequence. In some situations that may need to be prefixed by a call to the "./autogen.sh" script which invokes autoconf and automake. That in turn may require packages containing those utilities to be installed. The libtool utility is also required. Naturally a C compiler is required and due to the vagaries of libtool a C++ compiler also. The "./configure" takes many command line options with the defaults being usually sufficient to start with. One quirk is that the location of the installation is under the /usr/local directory. So the sg_inq utility will be installed at /usr/local/bin/sg_inq . This is controlled by the "--prefix=" option which defaults to "--prefix=/usr/local". As an example to install the executables in /usr/bin and disable the creation of the shared library (libsgutils.so) this invocation could be used: "./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-shared". The C code in this package is written for portability rather than speed. It assumes a level of C99 compliance and favours POSIX system and library calls over OS specific calls. In Linux there are package build files for "rpm" based and for "deb" based systems. The 'sg3_utils.spec' file in the main directory can be used like this: 'rpmbuild -ba sg3_utils.spec' in a rpmbuild tree SPECS directory. The 'build_debian.sh' script should build several "deb" packages and place them in the parent directory. In debian based systems doing a 'apt-get install build-essential' is one way to get most of build environment needed if it has not already been loaded. There are now some problems with this script and the superseded Debian 4.0 ("etch"). See debian/README.debian4 for a workaround. Amongst other things debian builds are sensitive to the value in the debian/compat file. If it contains "7" then it works on lenny and gives warning on squeeze (but fails on the earlier etch). Warning ======= Many devices use SCSI command sets over transport protocols not normally associated with SCSI (as defined at http://www.t10.org ). Some of these devices react poorly (e.g. lock up) when sent SCSI commands that they don't support. Even sending a supported SCSI command with a field set to an unexpected value can cause problems. [The author is talking about billions of USB devices with horrible SCSI implementations.] For example, all "SCSI" devices must support the INQUIRY command which the SCSI-2 standard says should request a 36 byte response. However later SCSI standards (e.g. SPC-2) have increased that length but some SCSI devices lock up when they receive a request for anything other than a 36 byte response. Any well implemented "SCSI" device should react sensibly when a utility in sg3_utils sends a SCSI command that it doesn't support. Unfortunately this cannot be guaranteed. Prior to lk 2.6.29 USB mass storage limited sense data to 18 bytes which caused problems for certain types of descriptor based sense data. An example of this is the SCSI ATA PASS-THROUGH command with the CK_COND bit set. Utilities ========= Here is list in alphabetical order of utilities found in the 'src' subdirectory of the sg3_utils package: sginfo, sgm_dd, sgp_dd, sg_dd, sg_decode_sense, sg_emc_trespass, sg_format, sg_get_config, sg_get_lba_status, sg_ident, sg_inq, sg_logs, sg_luns, sg_map, sg_map26, sg_modes, sg_opcodes, sg_persist, sg_prevent, sg_raw, sg_rbuf, sg_rdac, sg_read, sg_readcap, sg_read_block_limits, sg_read_buffer, sg_read_long, sg_reassign, sg_referrals, sg_request, sg_reset, sg_rmsn, sg_rtpg, sg_safte, sg_sanitize, sg_sat_identify, sg_sat_phy_event, sg_sat_set_features, sg_scan, sg_senddiag, sg_ses, sg_start, sg_stpg, sg_sync, sg_test_rwbuff, sg_turs, sg_unmap, sg_verify, sg_vpd, sg_write_buffer, sg_write_long, sg_write_same, sg_wr_mode Each of the above utilities depends on header files found in the 'include' subdirectory and library code found in the 'lib' subdirectory. Associated man pages are found in the 'doc' subdirectory. Additional programs found in the 'archive', 'examples' and 'utils' subdirectories in not build by the top level build infrastructure. Linux binary distributions of the sg3_utils package (e.g. "rpm" and debian packages) typically contain the shared library, the utilities found in the 'src' subdirectory, their associated man pages and some documentation files (e.g. README, INSTALL, CREDITS, COPYING and COVERAGE). See the INSTALL file for generic instructions about building with autotools (e.g. ./configure ). Man pages can be read (without building and installing the package) by going to the 'doc' subdirectory and executing something like this: $ man ./sg_dd.8 To see which SCSI commands (and ATA commands) are used by these utilities refer to the COVERAGE file. Here is a list in alphabetical order of utilities found in the 'examples' subdirectory: - bsg_queue_tst, sg_excl, scsi_inquiry, sg_iovec_tst, sg_queue_tst, sg_sat_chk_power, sg__sat_identify, sg__sat_phy_event, sg__sat_set_features, sg_sat_smart_rd_data, sg_simple1, sg_simple2, sg_simple3, sg_simple4, sg_simple5 and sg_simple16 Also in that subdirectory is a script to test sg_persist, an example data file for sg_persist (called "transport_ids.txt") and an example data file for sg_reassign (called "reassign_addr.txt"). There are several scripts for 'sg_senddiag -pf -raw=-' that will put some SAS disk phys into a "compliant jitter tolerance pattern" (CJTPAT). The 'utils' subdirectory contains source and a Makefile to build "hxascdmp" which accepts binary data from stdin (or a file on the command line) and outputs an ASCII-HEX and ASCII representation of it. It is similar to the Unix od command. There is also code to sg_chk_asc.c which checks a given text file (typically a copy of http://www.t10.org/lists/asc-num.txt ) and checks it against the asc/ascq text strings held in sg_lib_data.c . The 'doc' subdirectory contains a README file containing the urls of various related documents. The 'scripts' subdirectory contains some bourne (bash) shell scripts that rely on utilities in the main directory. One script uses the sdparm utility. These scripts are described in the scripts/README file and have usage messages. Notes for utilities without man pages ===================================== These utils are found in the 'examples' subdirectory. The "scsi_inquiry" program shows the use of the SCSI_IOCTL_SEND_COMMAND ioctl to send a SCSI INQUIRY command. That ioctl() is supported by the SCSI sub system mid level and so is common to all sd, sr, st and sg devices. That ioctl is deprecated in the lk 2.6 series. This program has been placed in the "examples" subdirectory. "sg_simple1" and "sg_simple2" are example programs demonstrating calls to the SCSI INQUIRY and TEST UNIT READY commands. They only differ in their error processing: sg_simple1 uses sg_lib.[hc] for error processing while sg_simple2 does its own more primitive checks. "sg_simple3" tests out user space scatter gather added to the version 3 sg driver. "sg_simple4" shows the INQUIRY command using mmap-ed IO to obtain its response buffer. "sg_simple5" also sends and INQUIRY and TEST UNIT READY commands. It uses the generic pass through mechanism based on sg_pt.h . It will currently build in Linux and FreeBSD (with "make -f Makefile.freebsd"). It has extensive error checking code. "sg_simple16" attempts to send a 16 byte SCSI command, READ_16, to the scsi device. This is only supported for lk >= 2.4.15 and for adapter drivers that indicate that they have 16 byte CDB capability (otherwise DID_ABORT will appear in the host_status). "sg_sat_chk_power" attempts to push an ATA CHECK POWER MODE command through the SAT-defined ATA PASS_THROUGH (16) SCSI command. That ATA command needs to read the "FIS" registers after the command is completed which involves using the ATA Status Return (sense data) descriptor (as defined in SAT). "sg_sat_smart_rd_data" attempts to push an ATA SMART/READ DATA command through the SAT-defined ATA PASS_THROUGH (16) SCSI command. If successful, the 256 word (512 byte) response is output. Command line processing ======================= These utilities can be divided into 3 groups when their handling of command line arguments is considered: - ad hoc, typically in a short form only, sometimes longer (e.g. "sg_logs -pcb /dev/sdc") - inspired by the dd Unix command (e.g. sg_dd, sgm_dd, sgp_dd, sg_read) - recent utilities use "getopt_long" (see "man getopt_long") type command lines. These have short form (starting with "-") and corresponding longer form (starting with "--") options. The older utilities that use ad hoc options, in alphabetical order: - sg_emc_trespass, sginfo(1/2), sg_inq, sg_logs, sg_map, sg_modes, sg_opcodes, sg_rbuf, sg_rdac, sg_readcap, sg_reset, sg_scan (Linux), sg_senddiag, sg_start, sg_test_rwbuf, sg_turs In sg3_utils version 1.23 the following utilities from this group were converted to have a dual getopt_long/ad_hoc interface, defaulting to the getop_long interface: - sg_inq, sg_logs, sg_modes, sg_opcodes, sg_rbuf, sg_readcap, sg_senddiag, sg_start, sg_turs These can be switched back to the older (backward compatible) ad hoc interface by defining the SG3_UTILS_OLD_OPTS environment variable or using '-O' as the first command line option. The more recent utilities that use "getopt_long" only are: - sg_decode_sense, sg_format sg_get_config sg_get_lba_status sg_ident sg_luns sg_map26 sg_persist sg_prevent sg_raw sg_read_block_limits sg_read_buffer sg_read_long sg_reassign sg_referrals sg_requests sg_rmsn sg_rtpg sg_safte sg_sanitize sg_sat_identify sg_sat_phy_event sg_sat_set_features sg_scan(w) sg_ses sg_stpg sg_sync sg_test_rwbuf sg_unmap sg_verify sg_vpd sg_write_buffer sg_write_long sg_write_same sg_wr_mode Dangerous code ============== This code: unsigned char uc = 0x80; unsigned long long = ull; ull = (uc << 24); Gives an unexpected result because the 'unary conversion' of uc to a (32 bit signed) 'int' before the shift. The resultant type from the shift is also an int and it has its top bit set so there is sign extension when it is assigned into a 64 bit integer. The above will fail in a similar way on 64 bit architectures that use the LP64 data model, if 'unsigned long ul' is used instead of ull variable in the above code example. Other SCSI and storage tools ============================ See http://sg.danny.cz/sg/tools.html Doug Gilbert 21st June 2011