Alternatives to cdrecord [LWN.net]

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 23:01 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Alternatives to cdrecord by brouhaha
Parent article: Alternatives to cdrecord

It should be possible to burn an ISO to a CD-R with dd, because that's the normal program for writing an image file to a block device. It's how you make boot floppies from disk images; optical media shouldn't need a different program.

Audio CDs are generally written with a lot of options and details, and that does make a special program worthwhile. But the common case where you just write the thing shouldn't require anything dd doesn't already do.

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Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 20, 2004 0:37 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

It should be possible to burn an ISO to a CD-R with dd, because that's the normal program for writing an image file to a block device.

If the CD-ROM driver presented a writable block device interface, then dd should be able to write to it.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the original statement; I thought it was a request to enhance dd to know how to write CDs. If it's really a request to make the CD-ROM driver present a writable block device interface, and to leave dd unchanaged, then I have no fundamental opposition to it.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 20, 2004 1:05 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That was actually the intent; have the kernel deal with all the complicated stuff and have userspace just write to the device; additionally, the kernel ought to have ioctls that deal with the weird stuff (which would be called by cd/dvd-specific tools instead of having them know SCSI). The thread was "cd burning: kernel / userspace?"