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Marcelo Tosatti on UnitedLinux (And More)

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

PDAJames writes "There's a new interview with Marcelo Tosatti online. He talks about what it's like to be kernel maintainer after nine months on the job and identifies the biggest problems with the kernel now. He also defends UnitedLinux against Mandrake's criticism. He would, since he works for Conectiva..."

1 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Heh by GoRK · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well you are wrong about one thing: "100% IDE"

    Burners are ATAPI devices - Calling them "IDE" is sort of like saying "Ethernet" when you mean "http" or something else like that. ATAPI was invented to bring SCSI devices into the consumer market with minimum cost to hardware manufacturers (ie no change of command api's in the devices firmware). As far as the command set goes, they are actually almost 100% SCSI. Ditto with ATAPI zip drives and tape drives. Heck, even the parallel port zip drives are SCSI (with a built in ppa SCSI controller). USB mass storage uses the SCSI command set also -- and I think Firewire does too (I may be wrong about firewire). ide-scsi is *not* a SCSI emulator. It is a transport, the same as the USB mass storage transport.

    IMO, the mistake was to write a seperate driver for ATAPI in the beginning that did NOT tie to the SCSI system - we might have a mature ATAPI/SCSI interface by now that did not have the problems that we see today.

    And why do you mention only CD burners? I use ide-scsi for regular CDROMS, zip drives, and tape drives. The application support is much better (ie i can do cd to cd copies, use all backup software, etc)

    ~GoRK