Hmm. It doesn't really matter whether one uses the ide or the scsi-device to communicate with a cd-burner. Most people don't realize that ATAPI is essencially SCSI over IDE. That means that there is not a single pure IDE-CD-burner on the market, all (modern) burners are SCSI-devices, they only differ in the kind of hardware interface they use.

Since SCSI is acctually a hardware independant protocol, SCSI-commands can be send just over any channel (there is even iSCSI whitch uses TCP/IP, if recall correctly). In FreeBSD 4.x cdburn could send SCSI-commands over the IDE-interface to the cd-burner. One coulnd't use cdrecord on ide-burners with it, because cdrecord needed pure SCSI-devices. With Linux 2.6 one can now also use the IDE-devices to send SCSI commands. New cdrecord releases support that, so there is no need to add "scsi-emulation" to the kernel any longer.

So both FreeBSD and Linux have the same features now, but they were added in reverse order *g*