1#	$Id: README.session,v 1.1 2000/10/10 20:40:11 beck Exp $
2
3	This release of mkisofs has basic support completed for
4multiple sessions.  However, we still need some interaction
5between cdrecord and mkisofs for this to work correctly. This is needed as
6only cdrecord knows the different ways to gather these numbers for all
7different drives. It may be that future versions of mkisofs will include
8the needed support for MMC compliant drives.
9
10	There are a few new options to mkisofs to allow for this.
11The first one is "-M /dev/scd0", and is used so that mkisofs can examine
12the entirety of the previous image so that it can figure out what additional
13files need to be written in the new session. Note that there are operating
14systems that don't allow to read from CD drives with a sector size
15of 2048 bytes per sector. To use mkisofs on such an operating system, you
16will need a version of mkisofs that includes the SCSI transport library
17from cdrecord. Simply use the dev= syntax from cdrecord with -M in
18such a case. It will tell mkisofs to use the SCSI transport library to
19read from the CD instead of using the standard read() OS interface.
20
21	There is also a temporary hack in mkisofs in the form of a '-C' option.
22The -C option takes two numbers as input, which are delimited by commas.
23For example, you could specify "-C 1000,1020", but you should never just
24make up numbers to use here.  These numbers are determined from cdrecord.
25
26	Note that if you use -C and omit -M, it effectively means that
27you are writing a new session, starting at a non-zero block number,
28and you are effectively ignoring all of the previous session contents.
29When this session is sent to the writer, the new session effectively
30"erases" the previous session.
31
32	In practice you should be able to do something like:
33
34mkisofs [other options] -C `cdrecord dev=b,t,l -msinfo` \
35		-M /dev/cdblkdev
36
37Replace 'b,t,l' by the aproriate numbers for SCSIbus, target and lun
38of your drive.
39
40Note: As of the 1.12b5 release, the multi-session technology has
41matured quite significantly.  It is entirely possible that bugs
42exists, or that further tweaks will be required somewhere along the
43way to get things working correctly.  The data gathering mode of
44cdrecord has been tested, and I believe it works correctly.  Caveat
45Emptor.
46
47[Mar 1, 1999].
48
49