Re: CD-R/RW: ATAPI? SCSI? IDE?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 12:44:18PM -0600, Harold Crouch wrote:
> Why must a CD-R/RW be treated differently than a CD-ROM?

Because until now the only way you could send random SCSI commands to
an ATAPI device (to burn CDs, in other words) was to use the ide-scsi
abomination.  On 2.6, the regular ide-cd driver plays nicely with
cdrecord (appropriately updated).

> Why was it necesary to change the Grub configuration line and add
> additional lines to /etc/modules?

To make ide-scsi work right.  (One of many reasons I say
"abomination".)

> Doesn't Linux auto-detect all hardware devices?

Not really, but in this case (on 2.4 kernels), you have to access the
CD-RW with either the ide-cd "personality" (that doesn't know how to
burn CDs) or the ide-scsi "personality" (that does).  All that crap
just tells the ide-cd driver to keep its hands off /dev/hdc (or
whatever you said) and let the ide-scsi driver have it.

This goes away with 2.6 kernels for the most part.  (Things like
ide-tape are still broken enough that ide-scsi will probably work
better, unfortunately, but CD-RWs and similar devices won't need
ide-scsi anymore.)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.