random problem with 8.3 from yesterday

[Ian Lepore]

On Sat, 2012-02-25 at 00:39 +0200, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 24/02/2012 18:23 Ian Lepore said the following:
> > I've always
> > suspected something in the geom layer isn't noticing that a CF or SD
> > card in the reader got removed/inserted/reformatted, and un-/re-plugging
> > the whole reader (making the cam layer destroy and recreate the devices)
> > makes geom aware of the change.
> 
> This is a fact, actually.  Nothing in GEOM layer (and below it) notices a silent
> card change, since most hardware doesn't have any notification for the change
> and FreeBSD disk stack doesn't do any polling for changes.
> 

If the hardware did have change notification, is there a mechanism that
would communicate that to geom?  That's a precursor question to my real
question:  is there a way to manually kick geom when necessary?  If the
api exists but there's no userland app to make the needed calls, I'll
write some code -- just point me at a manpage or header file.

-- Ian