Sorry all to keep this going... but there are still good points coming up
from time to time. I stick by my guns here. Actually, I wonder if Linus
has an opinion. I've never heard him address this issue. Linus, maybe
you'd be willing to put this to rest.
Linda,
> I dunno. IRIX has had the ability to mount audio CD's for about 4
> years. It sees the tracks as '.aiff' format files and seems to handle
> conversions fairly well. The mediad even automounts the CD depending
> on its format. I've always thought that was 'nifty'. What would be
> the harm in having a modular driver for it? It's not kernel bloat
> unless you want to select in that driver. If you didn't want it --
> use a userspace ripper. The driver can be tweaked until it produces
> optimal output.
I couldn't agree with you more. It is "nifty" to have audio cds mounted
as .aiff files. That's the whole reason that I wrote audiofs about a year
ago. My filesystem allowed you to mount cd tracks as either .au or .wav
files and could be compiled as a kernel module. Personally, I think the
conversion to .aiff is a little bit much, especially if there is any
compression going on. Why compress the cd output stream? There's
certainly enough room for it on the raw media.
Actually, I'm writing this e-mail from an Octane workstation, and I'm
sitting next to 3 16x12K Origin-2000 cabinets running IRIX 6.5.x, so I
sure can't bash SGI. We've been using them in our research cluster for a
decade. Still, I'd make the move to PCs in a heartbeat.
However, there are one or two points about IRIX that I don't like:
1) CPU usage is unacceptably high
2) CD command response time is slow
3) Anything else that accesses the audio channels stop the CD
from playing, even during a virtual file read.
4) A process reading a cd file that zombies leaves the
CD rom in an inaccessable state
You would probably know better than I would, but I feel these are all
artifacts of the fact that the OS is doing _way_ too much here.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
JM
-----------------------------------------------------------------
JM Geremia
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Physics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08540
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