Artem's Weblog

OpenSolaris build 124 is out and includes a new feature: now you can use the eject button on your CD/DVD drive to eject the disc, even if it is mounted. To quote the heads-up message:

Pressing Eject button on CD/DVD drive's front panel will have the same effect as typing 'eject' in the terminal or clicking the corresponding GUI icon in the File Browser. Most modern drives support this feature, though some older ones don't.

You may see a harmless pop-up message "Unable to unmount volume" due to GNOME bug 9805. It can be safely ignored, but if it bothers you, the workaround is:

svccfg -s rmvolmgr setprop rmvolmgr/eject_button=boolean: false svcadm restart rmvolmgr

The side effect of the workaround is being able to use physical eject button only with a GNOME session running, not when logged into the text console.

Aside from the issues listed in the build notes, be aware of the "Console User" problems. If you are curious about how the eject button works in OpenSolaris, read ARC case 2009/058.

It is quite remarkable that Solaris managed to go without this capability for so long: other OSes have had it for years. I should have fixed it as part of the Tamarack project, but had to sacrifice some features to meet the schedule. I then switched to networking projects, and the feeling of unfinished business has been nagging me ever since.

Walking around with a solution to a problem in your head is, I imagine, not unlike being pregnant: you cannot carry it inside forever. I knew how, I had the code visualized mentally. It was a great relief when one evening I finally initiated the mind->computer transfer. The hard part was to properly test the code: too much weird or buggy hardware out there. All of the PCs, x86 laptops and recent Sun products worked just fine. I did encounter some old Sun gear that did not support the eject button - for those, the eject(1M) command continues to be the only option.