Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to find time to continue work on this any time soon. If anyone wants to pick up the project, send me an email (address can be found at the end of the page

About Mt Rainier

Mt Rainier (also known as Mount Rainier) is a hardware-based implementation of packet writing, featuring automatic redundancy (handling of bad blocks) and background-based operation. For more info, see the Mt Rainier website and the FAQ. Also see my general page on enhancing packet writing in Linux.

Linux & Mt Rainier

In 2002, Philips were decent enough to submit two sample Mt Rainier capable drives, plus the specifications, to Jens Axboe (maintainer of the Linux CD/DVD drivers). Jens added Mt Rainier support to Linux and produced the basic utility software required to control Mt Rainier drives.

Even though good quality Mt Rainier support has been included in Linux since the start of 2004, there does not seem to be much hype around this exciting technology - not many people seem to know about it. More interestingly, Linux stands far ahead of the game - no other operating system (not even Windows) includes native Mt Rainier support. Linux is sometimes accused of "sleeping at the wheel", and this is a technology where we seem to have an opportunity to stand out - I'd like to see us taking this further.

Current situation

A small userspace utility exists to interface with the kernel code which allows you to format a blank disc in MRW format. As far as I can see, no other software has implemented this functionality.

Once the disc has been formatted, you can write a filesystem onto the device node (UDF is commonly used) and then it can be mounted and unmounted like any other block device. From this perspective, desktop support is there - the format process is only the real missing stage.

My aim

After providing a complete/simple/standard userspace interface for this technology I aim to get this functionality integrated into common desktop environments. See my packet writing page.

Plans / Roadmap

  1. Create libmtrainier.

    Putting code into a library makes the functionality much more accessible to other software projects wishing to incorporate Mt Rainier support. They will be able to simply link to the library and call the functions without worrying too much about how the system works.

    The library will provide functions to format discs in the MRW format, to detect whether a CD drive is capable of creating MRW discs, to detect whether media has been formatted as MRW, and to read the status of the Mt Rainier CD/DVD drive. This code will be taken from Jens' userspace utility.

    Started, November 2004.

  2. Create cdmrw.

    Given the same name as Jens' existing utility, this will be the command line interface for libmtrainier. It will provide the basic functionality of formatting discs in the MRW format.

    This will also be referred to as a reference implementation of a libmtrainier client.

    Started, November 2004.

  3. Write man page for cdmrw.

  4. Get libmtrainier and cdmrw into distributions.

    I'll try and get some more testing of the code so that any issues can be ironed out early on. I am able to add these packages to the Gentoo distribution, I will require help distributing them elsewhere.

  5. Produce API docs for libmtrainier.

Downloads

Soon.
- Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>
Updated 2005-02-20