<jjgarcia@ind-cr.uclm.es> (Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll) writes:

> So the question is has anybody managed to use a USB
> CD-RW unit with NetBSD. I interpret that CD-RW are mass
> storage units and as such they should belong to umass*.
> My 1.4.2 kernel is detecting it (great!) but puts it
> under ugen0 (too bad!), which means I cannot mount it.

This should be in a FAQ by now....

The short answer is "no, they don't work".

The longer answer is that while there is a USB Mass Storage spec, and
we have a driver for (some parts of) it, and it works with devices
that follow that spec (like the USB Zip drives), the makers of USB
CD-R/RW drives* use chipsets that follow a proprietary protocol, not
the USB Mass Storage protocol. I've talked to the makers of one of the
more popular USB-ATAPI chipsets, and they had absolutely no interest
in providing documentation that wasn't under an NDA.

It's also vaguely feasable that someone who was familiar with USB and
ATAPI could use the software protocol analyzer under Windows to
reverse-engineer the protocol, but I don't think anyone has done so yet.

        - Nathan

* all the ones that I've tried or seen reported. Counterexamples would
  be lovely.