On Wednesday, July 06, 2011 06:21:04 PM you wrote:
>  Thus, I conclude that the later kernel 
> 2.6.32-131.2.1.el6.x86_64 has a bug compared to the earlier 
> 2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64 .  Should I simply change to the still later 
> OpenSUSE kernel or is there another solution?
> 
> Also, in RHEL 6, what is needed for the automatic creation of /dev/sdX 
> where X is appropriate for a USB drive (e.g., /dev/sde automatically 
> created on my particular workstation).

It may be that the Fedora 14 instructions may help you.  See:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F14_bugs#USB_3.0_ports_not_working

The technical piece is that a udev rule to associate usbstorage with xhci or xhci_hcd has to exist to do the dynamic device creation.  But it seems there is a deeper issue with your particular hardware and the particular kernel.

Having said that, you may need to just simply wait for 6.1; upstream 6.1 officially supports USB 3.0 (yes, with the 2.6.32 kernel; read in upstream's docs about 'backports' and what that means for the upstream (and thus SL) kernel).  In 6.0 USB3 support was listed as a 'technology preview' and not fully supported.

But, no, you can't just install a 2.6.37 generic kernel on SL6.

> Aside:  technical netiquette threading question.  
...
> However, if I were to [change the subject line] , would I not cause issues with
> the way threaded readers work?  The new subject is more informative, and is
> not really a new thread.

Only readers that thread only by subject should have been impacted.  Readers that thread using the References: headers would not, as long as your e-mail client does not remove those headers when changing the subject (which it doesn't appear to do, since that is what caused the whole deal with the thread hijacking stuff.....which doesn't need rehashing.).