is magicdev evil?

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 15:14, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 16:57, Tommy McNeely wrote:

<snip...>

> > Don't CDROMS send some sort of "signal" when they are opened/closed that
> > would be better than constantly probing it?
> 
> Basically:
> 
>  A) If magicdev is eating 25% of your CPU, something is going wrong,
>     and you shoudl file a bug so we can fix it. It isn't supposed
>     to do that.

<snip...>

>     
>  B) No, CDROMS do not reliably send a signal when they are opened
>     and closed. There are things in the spec for that, they are not
>     implemented uniformly.
> 
>     There may be better things to do than what magicdev does. They
>     probably would require full-time work for about a month for a
>     pair of a test engineer and a developer to get going and make
>     reliable.

<snip...>

Of note, I have run Windows (NT/XP/Server) in a VMware session for
years. If you follow what's happening on VMware, you learn quickly that
polling a CD-R/RW/DVD device every few seconds is the norm there as
well. This shouldn't come as a surprise at all.

I noticed that magicdev seems to really interfere with XCDRoast 0.98a14
but not the earlier version. GNOME Toaster is also OK. I noticed on the
XCDRoast page that 0.98a14 apparently includes a totally rewritten
subsystem for disk reads and writes. Part of the problem could be
there...

Cheers,

Chris

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