Re: CD Jukeboxes

Gerd Knorr (kraxel@cs.tu-berlin.de)
Thu, 6 Feb 1997 21:27:55 +0100

In article <Pine.WNT.3.95.970206084220.105B-100000@hw00046.cypres.nl>, you wrote:
>
>(Sidetrack) - Has it ever been considered to bring IDE ans SCSI under the
>same driver model ? That could save a lot of maintenance. Drives could be
>mapped to ID's and Changers could be mapped to LUN's. The 32bit windows
>versions work this way, and it appears to work fine.

Both IDE and SCSI cdrom drivers use the generic cdrom driver, that's all.
I don't think it is useful (or even possible) to have some common changer
code for IDE and SCSI, becauce there is one important difference:

- SCSI changers do the changer stuff completely in _hardware_. From kernel's
point of view, there is no difference between a 6x changer and 6 single
cdrom drives (except that 6 single drives are faster...).
- IDE changers are different: the kernel sees one cdrom drive which has some
extra commands for changing CD's. The IDE driver would have to do all the
changer stuff in _software_, if he wants present a 3x changer with one
device for each slot. Not impossible, but this is'nt a 5-min-hack...

Gerd

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