From owner-freebsd-current Thu Oct 8 13:00:01 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id NAA06028 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Thu, 8 Oct 1998 13:00:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from void.cs.rpi.edu (void.cs.rpi.edu [128.213.8.27]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA06000 for ; Thu, 8 Oct 1998 12:59:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from crossd@void.cs.rpi.edu) Received: from localhost (crossd@localhost) by void.cs.rpi.edu (980427.SGI.8.8.8/970903.SGI.AUTOCF) via ESMTP id PAA01463; Thu, 8 Oct 1998 15:58:56 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1998 15:58:51 -0400 From: "David E. Cross" To: Terry Lambert cc: Mike Smith , Marius.Bendiksen@scancall.no, toasty@home.dragondata.com, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: CDROM as system disk In-Reply-To: <199810081905.MAA26707@usr08.primenet.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Terry Lambert wrote: > > It's determined by the drive, not the driver. None of our drivers > > spin the CDROM down intentionally. > > > > Many drives don't offer any standard way of disabling the spindown; > > you're basically stuck with it. > > I thought you could avoid spindown by reading the thing... >^). Slight problem, disk caching. If you are going to ping the drive every N time units as a 'keep-alive', those blocks will very quickly get cached; unless you devise some clever algorithm that will always ensure that you get a block not in the cache (consider the cache could me a megabyte or more in size, and this gets tricky) -- David Cross To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message