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Date:      Thu, 2 Nov 1995 10:52:02 +0100 (MET)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Cc:        lyndon@orthanc.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Automounting CD-ROMs
Message-ID:  <199511020952.KAA25179@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <27895.815289349@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Nov 1, 95 09:15:49 pm

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As Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> 
> Well, Terry will probably reject this as architecturally unclean (*grin*)
> but it sounds like something that would fill the bill quite nicely
> for now..  Any takers? :-)

The "mediad" has three disadvantages:

o It's consuming valuable physical RAM, it has to wakeup very often,
  causing it to not being paged out.  Nevertheless, its actions are
  only rarely required.  (I.e., it is consuming rather much space
  although it is only seldom actually needed.)

o It causes continuous rescans of the SCSI bus (making the LEDs
  flickering nervously), and it attempts to lay its hands down on all
  the drives.  You can confuse the hell out of IRIX' mediad by
  sticking a tar floppy into the drive.  Or put a CD into the drive
  that has an iso9660 as well as a Mac HFS -- and mediad will become
  confused, sometimes mouting it as iso9660 medium, sometimes as hfs.

o The entire idea is unusable for floppies due to the braindead PC
  design that doesn't actually allow you to find out about the status
  of a floppy drive without turning the motor on all the time.


I think, a "mount on demand" approach would be better suited (even
though it's certainly harder to implement).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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