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From: lance@unix386.Convergent.COM (Lance Norskog)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: Writing a device driver for CDROM
Keywords: bsd devicedriver cdrom
Message-ID: <8892@unix386.Convergent.COM>
Date: 2 Jul 92 23:47:16 GMT
References: <1992Jun20.152106.159@rai.juice.or.jp>
Organization: Unisys/Convergent, San Jose, CA
Lines: 23

Those of you working on CDROM support: please remember that some of
will want to copy the CDROM onto a hard disk partition and use it
from there.  A few of us will want to produce our own CDROMs
by building an image into hard disk.

So, please don't make the CDROM file system require device-specific
ioctl's to the SCSI driver.

Now that I think of it, I'd like to allocate a disk partition as
a "hot cache" of a CDROM; this would be a handy option to the
CDROM file system.  Those drives are really slow...

Also, a group doing multimedia at Berkeley found that the cheapest
way to get tight interactive real-time playback from CDROM is to 
have two drives and two disks.  Buffering data on a hard disk
works pooly because of causality issues.

So, the CDROM software should be able to handle this transparently.

Thanks a bunch,

lance norskog
thinman@netcom.com