IDEA: dummy cd-rom device

Toby Reed (root@porknet.ml.org)
Sat, 3 Jan 1998 23:20:55 -0800 (PST)

After accidentally burning a few audio CD-Rs with the wrong byte order, I
was irritated that there was no simple way to use a loopback-filesystem
like method to play them before burning.

Perhaps we could implement a dummy cd-rom device as a module such that you
could point it to a set of images to represent each track, regardless of
audio or video. Then you could use a program like xmcd or workman to play
an audio CD recorded on the hard drive by changing the link of /dev/cdrom
to /dev/dummycd. you could 'rmmod dummycd;modprobe dummycd
tracks=data01.cdr,audio02.cdr,audio03.cdr' to change virtual CDs. The
device would support all CD-ROM ioctls, etc.... so you could effectively
emulate a CD-ROM in software...I'm not sure about the behavior of the
eject ioctl, but I'm sure someone can think of a logical behavior.
(rerun module_init?) Perhaps this would also allow video CDs or similar to
be tested.

Warning: this idea is very alpha ;)

Give any feedback you feel is needed....

-TR