You might hesitate to accept this proposal as it comes from the LINUX community, and not from some standardizing institute. What about SUN, SGI, HP and all those other Unix and hardware vendors? Well, these companies are in the lucky position that they generally control both the hardware and software of their supported products, and are large enough to set their own standard. They do not have to deal with a dozen or more different, competing hardware configurations.4
We believe that using ONONBLOCK to indicate that a device is being opened for ioctl commands only can be easily introduced in the LINUX community. All the CD-player authors will have to be informed, we can even send in our own patches to the programs. The use of ONONBLOCK has most likely no influence on the behavior of the CD-players on other operating systems than LINUX. Finally, a user can always revert to old behavior by a call to ioctl (filedescriptor, CDROMCLEAROPTIONS, CDOUSEFFLAGS).