Are RWs a problem?

[Mike McCarty]

Craig White wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 17:44 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:

[snip]

>>The only thing that works on my machine is
>>
>>(1) Insert the disc
>>(2) If it was blank, wait for the CD Maker to start, then kill it
>>(3) If it was not blank, wait for it to mount, start a CLI, and umount it
>>(4) Start or continue with K3b.
> 
> ----
> but to be accurate...this is on FC-2 and things have changed a bit since
> then.

I don't know whether this particular thing has changed, but I doubt it.
Certainly some things have changed.

> ----
> 
>>I never have approved of auto mouting like this. IMO, MicroSoft products
>>handle removable media better than UNIX like OSs, especially floppies.
> 
> ----
> I'm not sure what you mean - Windows will automount a CD, Linux will
> automount a CD. I know that EZ-CD Creator will prevent automounting a CD

My MSDOS machine does not automount anything. I also dislike the way
Windows automounts CDROMS. Windows does not automount floppies.

> that is inserted if EZ-CD is foreground application - but I do recall
> CD's automounting when inserted even when K3b is foreground application.
> So perhaps, this still might not be a suitable method.

I'm not Windows-aware enough to know about that, but it would make
sense not to automount when something else is already trying to use
the device. OTOH, there would need to be a way of registering that,
either as a system call [flock()?] or in a configuration file.

> As for floppies...I dunno - Windows is pretty non-responsive to other
> stuff when formatting/writing to a floppy, whereas Linux just buffers
> it...but that does mean that to flush the buffers, it is necessary to
> unmount it first. It would seem that both approaches have their
> benefits/drawbacks.

Well, nearly every decision I've made in my life, with very few
exceptions, was some sort of compromise. Formatting a floppy
should not make the machine slow. That sounds like a non-interrupt
polling method for handling the disc. I'm also not savvy enough
about the floppy disc I/F to know whether it *can* interrupt,
though I did at one time write a program which could format
a 360K floppy (before IOCTL() took over the job from the BIOS),
and could display/mark/unmark bad sectors on them, as well
as map them (looking for scratches).

IINM, sync will also flush pending writes to a floppy with Linux.

Mike
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