That would *really* surprise me.
Remember: when polling on optical drives, hald uses O_EXCL and that
should make open(2) fail with EBUSY if someone else has opened that
device O_EXCL - and all cd recording software in the Fedora distribution
should do that otherwise it's a bug.
you missed the point. Hal polls the *other* IDE device on the bus.
ANd that polling can take long enough so that the bus is locked too long
and you get a buffer underrun.