Re: [RFC] Tape driver rationalization for Linux 2.5?

[Nicholas Knight <nknight@pocketinet.com>]

On Wednesday 19 December 2001 02:29 pm, Willem Riede wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Being the maintainer of the driver for Onstream tape drives (osst)
> and wanting to stay abreast with the kernel evolution, I've been
> reading up on some of the changes that are being made to the scsi
> sub-system in the 2.5.x kernel series, and that has got me
> thinking...
>
> I've never really understood why there are separate high level
> drivers for tape drives -- or cdroms for that matter (other than "it
> just happened that way").
>
> Also, I find the fact that the user needs to tell the kernel at boot
> time whether (s)he is going to use ide-scsi or not awkward. You
> should be able to point any appropriate driver to a device by loading
> the corresponding module (and maybe tell the module specifically not
> to touch some compatible device, but preferably just gracefully
> shared and locked (think sg)).
>
> I'm not alone here, quoting Linus from the Scheduler thread:
>    'And even more important than performance is being able to read
> and write to CD-RW disks without having to know about things like
> "ide-scsi" etc, and do it sanely over different bus architectures
> etc.'


Am I alone in knowing that, at least as of 2.4.9 (the earliest I'm 
really sure I used it on) through 2.4.16, you DON'T need any weird 
boot-time switches?
Simply DO NOT compile in the IDE CD-ROM drive, compile in SCSI CD-ROM 
and SCSI Generic support, and voila, fully functional ATAPI CD writer
this even works on my IDE DVD drive
to read from em, I just use /dev/scd#
I am using NO boot time flags, including ide-scsi