On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 09:39:53AM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote: > So, say that the master is a CD-ROM drive and the slave is a CD-R. Now, > cdrecord writes to the slave and hal polls only the master (because hal > is locked out by O_EXCL on the slave); shouldn't stalling only occur if > the master employs powersaving? No. If you've just changed the media then it will spin up, scan the TOC and take time to respond. Its a corner case and its a strongly ill advised configuration > I've only seen reports on the stall for laptops (actually only Dell > laptops), e.g. I don't think ordinary desktop optical drives uses > powersaving? FWIW, I couldn't reproduce it the stall on a desktop system > anyway. And I must admit - I would be surprised to see a laptop with two > optical drives on the same IDE channel. All drives have some internal power management, how they respond to the OS isnt really defined providing they do respond. Again the dell one is a weird drive