Optical drive accumulates "veto tray eject" commands when left empty

[Stephan Sokolow]

For as long as I can remember (present in 22.04 LTS, present in 20.04 LTS, present in 16.04 LTS, and I can't remember any further back), Kubuntu and Lubuntu (the only spins I use) have had a bug where attempting to eject the drive will result in the drive beginning to eject, but then, so quickly that the tray hasn't even had a chance to open a full millimeter, will command a "load" and pull it back in.

In older releases, 20.04 LTS included, it was also prone to letting the tray eject fully and then trying to pull it back in immediately unless I was quick with a press on the physical eject button to cancel the operation.

In 22.04 LTS, it seems to eject just fine with a disc in it, but the empty tray behaviour remains.

Specifically, if I leave the tray empty, the closed drive seems to "accumulate" commands to load a disc, so that I then have to press eject several times before it will stop "countermanding" my attempts to open the tray.

If I knew how to snoop on what traffic is being sent to the drive, my first hypothesis to test would be that some daemon (eg. maybe the automount infrastructure) is trying to query the disc and queueing up this weird behaviour as a side-effect.

This has happened with multiple drives from different manufacturers, including multiple DVD drives from companies like LiteOn and LG in my old PC and the BluRay/DVD combo drive in the new PC I just built earlier this month... though I did carry over my homedir and some /etc files, the latter of which don't cover anything I'd associate with removable media. (My old PC also has two DVD drives, so I can confirm that it doesn't have something like an "only /dev/sr0" quirk to it.)

As a result of this, I've built a strong habit of always leaving a blank DVD+R in the drive when it's "empty", but one of my informal new year's resolutions was to PROPERLY address the papercuts I've been working around for so long.

I tried using ubuntu-bug, but it refused to let me proceed unless I could figure out what package was at fault so, if there's anything you want me to do in order to gather more diagnostic information, let me know.

In short:

One affected version:
  Distributor ID: Ubuntu
  Description: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
  Release: 22.04
  Codename: jammy

Expected behaviour: Drive ejects when commanded to

Observed behaviour: If drive was left empty, it will take multiple attempts before ejecting, whether triggered by software or the hardware button, results in just a clunk from the drive tray exiting and immediately re-entering "fully closed" state.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Libera.chat.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/2051724/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

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