On Sun, 2005-03-13 at 01:32 +1000, QuantumG wrote: > Jeff Waugh wrote: > > >Windows is lying a little bit, to give you a nicer interface. Audio CDs are > >not like data CDs, and cannot be mounted. > > > > > > From a purely philosophical point of view, what would be a good reason > for not have a kernel module that mounts audio CDs by interpreting the > red book format? Seems kind of silly to have code at the application > level doing this low level interpretation.
Well, I actually recall there having been a kernel module to do
precisely this. In fact, this page:
http://www.ii.pw.edu.pl/~borkowsm/cdfs.htm
agrees with me. The issue is that the format of an audio CD isn't quite
like other random access filesystems that you'd normally deal with in a
kernel module. This page:
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#play
Has some details about it. Now, that in and of itself doesn't mean you
*can't* do it in the kernel, but I'm personally of the opinion that it
makes more sense to leave that stuff in userland.
There are some userspace filesystems that will do this though. KIO's
audiocd: plugin does this really nicely. GnomeVFS has some code to do it
in the standard distribution, but it's turned off by default (at least
it did the last time I was digging through gnome-vfs code. Good times.).
I'm actually pretty sure that's how Windows does it as well.
But you were after a philosophical answer, so here goes: Developing
stuff in the kernel is harder than developing it in userland (as but one
example, I'm stuck using C in the kernel, but I can use the obscure
language of my choice in userland). The kernel's job is to provide
primitives that make it easy for application developers to get this
stuff working. Now, there might be a convenience angle to mounting an
audio CD (though I'm not sold on it), but I don't think it really serves
as a better application development primitive than a library in this
case.
So it shouldn't be in the kernel because it can just as easily be
elsewhere.
HTH,
James.
--
"There is no I in TEAM but there is an i in Ninja"
-- http://www.ninjaburger.com/sekrit/
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