driver was snappy in that regard. When I replaced our sleeping loop with a busy-wait same as the original the snappyness returned and moreover, reading the TOC from the CD went from something close to a minute to approximately a second. Thought that minute was just because I was dealing with an old junk 1-speed drive...
It happens. If you want to be fairer you can check need_resched in the
loop so that you still share the CPU fairly with other users.