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Where is the CD-ROM API documented?

April 26, 2017API CD-ROM documented

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Where is the CD-ROM API documented?

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If you want to write your own application, such as an audio CD player program, you will need to understand the application programming interface (API) provided by Linux. Originally the CD-ROM kernel drivers used their own ioctl() functions to support features specific to each drive. Header files such as /usr/include/linux/sbpcd.h describe these. Because many of the drivers were based on other drivers, the interfaces, while not identical, have a lot in common. More recently there has been an initiative headed by David van Leeuwen (david@tm.tno.nl) to standardize the API for CD-ROM drives, putting common code in one place and ensuring that all drivers exhibit the same behaviour. This is documented in the file /usr/src/linux/Documentation/cdrom/cdrom-standard.tex. Several kernel drivers support this. As of the 2.0 kernel all CD-ROM drivers conform to this API. My book, Linux Multimedia Guide, goes into quite a bit of detail on how to program CD-ROM drives, especially for audio functions.