Upgraded from Red Hat 5.2 to Red Hat 6.0 with the kernel from kernel-2.2.5-22.i586.rpm. The SCSI tape drive (Exabyte 8500 on Adaptec 2940) was no longer detected by the kernel during boot. Switching to the kernel in kernel-2.2.5-22.i386.rpm appears to have fixed the problem. The i386 variant of the kernel detects the SCSI tape drive.
that's odd. In both cases the st driver is compiled into the kernel. Exactly how does it fail - does the device not show up in /proc/scsi/scsi?
References to /dev/st0 produce the error "no such device" and the tape drive does not appear in /proc/scsi/scsi. Other SCSI devices (hard disk and CD-ROM) are detected properly. The SCSI tape driver _is_ listed in the link map for the kernel.
Hm. Out of curiousity, what happens if you try the i586 kernel from Raw Hide (ftp://rawhide.redhat.com/i386/RedHat/RPMS/kernel-*i586.rpm), or compile your own i586 kernel from the same sources?