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Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 20:47:52 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: "Calin A. Culianu" <calin@ajvar.org>
CC: Stevie O <stevie@qrpff.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Asynchronous CDROM Events in Userland
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Calin A. Culianu wrote:

>>>
>>Does it spin up the CD-ROM doing so?
>>
> 
> 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...]
> 


That just indicates a bullsh*t program.  It's also pretty certain that 
these kinds of things don't belong in the GUI; one of the things I'd 
like to do at some point is to write a daemon to mount things on insert 
(vold).

	-hpa


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