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Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 23:44:58 -0500 (EST)
From: "Calin A. Culianu" <calin@ajvar.org>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Stevie O <stevie@qrpff.net>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Asynchronous CDROM Events in Userland
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On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> Stevie O wrote:
>
> > At 09:07 PM 2/3/2002 -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >
> >> Rather than a signal, it should be a file descriptor of some sort, so
> >> one can select() etc on it.  Personally I can't imagine polling would
> >> take any appreciable amount of resources, though.
> >
> >
> > Windows 95 polls the cd-rom drive for autorun.
> > It kills laptop batteries REAL quick.
> > CPU & memory aren't the only resources...
> >
>
> Does it spin up the CD-ROM doing so?
>
> 	-hpa

Probably it doesn't, but just having the cpu be non-idle when it could
otherwise be idle does add up over time.  In linux, polling the cdrom
*seems* inexpensive enough, but if you look at 'top' it seems to average
out to like 1-2% cpu time!  (Ok, these stats aren't super-accurate,
they're just from running 'top' with the kde autorun tool running).

[Admitedly, the autorun tool is written kind of strangely (it does one
redundant ioctl, plus it wait()s on its children constantly rather than
installing a signal handler), but still.. it would be nice to get those
extra cycles for quake3 or wolfenstein...]

-Calin

>
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