Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 18 Jan 1999 15:01:42 -0800 (PST) | From | a sun <> | Subject | Re: CD query |
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> 2. If so, can Win9x or Linux use them?
Linux cannot use them, AFAIK.
well, currently some of the filesystems (e.g., hfs) actually have partition support in them to handle cds with partition tables. i don't know what the other filesystems do. it's really the wrong thing to do, but it's the only way of doing it with the current cdrom setup. i was actually a little shocked when i found out that the cd driver didn't call out to the paritition code in genhd.c.
It would be a good idea to support them, but it would require choosing a different major number and different minor numbering strategy for them. The problem is that limiting number of CDs to e.g. 16 is not possible due to changers where you can have hundreds of CDs attached to one machine.
i had been meaning to look at the cd code a while back to see what needed to be done to add partition table support. of course, other stuff ended up taking precedence. in any case, i had forgotten that cd's are handled differently than hard disks. what was the rationale behind that?
it seems like having something analogous to the hard drive setup would work much better (i.e., something like /dev/scda allows access to non-partitioned cd while /dev/scda0 and dev/scda1 access the 0th and 1st partitions.). it doesn't deal with the jillions of cd's example that well, but then the current device numbering scheme isn't good for that anyway.
-a asun@u.washington.edu
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