has anyone installed 5.1 from a SCSI CD?

[Sergey Babkin]

Hi all,

I've got the compiler on my -current partition hosed (I did a make
install at a time when it was unstable, and now it dies when
recompiling -current), so I decided to re-base it with 5.1.
That's when I discovered an unpleasent issue: it could not mount
SCSI CD-ROM! The devices (I have two of them) show up fine in dmesg 
and the entries in /dev are created fine but then when I try
to mount it, it says that the operation is not supported by
the device! Huh? Someone has been playing too much with the
CD driver.

BTW, I have another related issue too: since at least 4.7
all the disk device nodes have charcater device entries in /dev.
That's very, very wrong. Even though there may be no difference
any more between the charcater and block drivers, the type of
device node still conveys the information about device types
to the applications. One case in point being a viewer application
(if anyone is interested, http://nac.sf.net ) which must handle
the sequential and random-access devices differently: for
the random-access device it can page in the data for viewing on demand
(and discard when some part is not viewed, since it can be read
again easily), with possibility to jump to a random address, while 
for a sequential device it must read the data sequentially to a 
local buffer and never discard data from that buffer. It works
fine on every system except the recent FreeBSD :-(

-SB