Enhanced st SCSI Reservations

Starting with this release, there is a new reservation mechanism in the st driver. The new mechanism enables the st driver to reserve the tape drive only when a command that requires reservations is sent. The reservation mechanism also enables the st driver to process inquiry commands issued from other hosts while the drive is reserved by a different host.

Some of Independent Software Vendor's (ISV's) backup software and media management tools benefit from the enhanced st SCSI reservations feature. Because of this new feature, management tools could inquire and browse tape libraries when the backup tool is reading or writing tapes.