[GLLUG] CD-RW Packet Writing

[Marr]

Folks,

At last week's meeting, someone (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten) 
asked about packet writing on optical media.

I'm finally getting around to reading the Linux Weekly News (LWN) from last 
week and saw this encouraging blurb in the 'Kernel Development News' section:

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Among the other 654 patches in 2.6.9-rc3-mm2 are found: 

   A big DVD+RW support patch, which includes CDRW packet writing support. 

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In short, it looks like the final piece of kernel support has made it into 
Andrew Morton's kernel source tree, so if it makes it from there into Linus' 
tree, we soon might be able to avoid patching the kernel in order to get 
packet-writing support. 

This is something I've been awaiting for years and have never understood why 
it took so long. Besides playing an occasional Windows-only game, 
packet-writing CD-RWs is literally the last thing I still use Windows for. 
The necessary UDF filesystem support (by Ben Fennema) has been part of the 
Linux kernel for a long time (years?) now. I've been happily _reading_ UDF 
packet-written CD media ('mount -t udf ...') under Linux for a long time.

For anyone interested, Peter Osterlund has been updating the (ancient) Jens 
Axboe packet-writing patch for current kernels at:

   http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404340/patches/packet/

Bill Marr