Linux 5.17 Lands Fix For Hanging If Ejecting A Broken Floppy

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.17 Lands Fix For Hanging If Ejecting A Broken Floppy

If you are in the rare group of folks still relying upon floppy disks and doing so while running up-to-date software stacks, Linux 5.17 will be of interest to you...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.17-Lands-Floppy-Fix

[timofonic]

Please support floppies. They aren't practical, but digital recovery and preservation makes it a necessity.

There's hardware floppy emulators such as Gotek ones, but sometimes you need to read something from a damn floppy.

The same about ancient and unused filesystems, there's a niche for being able to read them natively. And recovery companies are extremely expensive.

[stormcrow]

Relying on? No. But they are still important for data preservation and forensics. Course the last time I worked with them a couple of years ago I wasn't using Linux because Linux wasn't... HEH!... reliable with dealing with floppy drives and floppy disks. It's one of the few cases where I've avoided using Linux outside of dealing with OS specific metadata.

[Danny3]

And me who's waiting to see Zstd code updated one more time to the latest version this time for better BTRFS+Zstd, I see this.
Well, I guess everybody deserves to be happy with their use case.

[M@GOid]

Some of you ever called those "diskettes" back then? We did it here in Brazil, but I don't remember reading or hearing English speakers calling those "diskettes", just "floppies".

[Sonadow]

How about actually fixing the stupid two decades-old issue of having the entire Linux kernel hang when trying to unmount a drive that has been improperly removed, or a disconnected network share?

Hell, Windows never had a problem with such things since day one.

[halo9en]

But they are still important for data preservation and forensics.

Forensics? You mean there are people actually using floppies to store illegal content?

[Blzut3]

While I'm sure not a super common use case, but floppies are still used in retro computing. Since modern systems don't have an FDC I'm currently using an LS-120 drive in my Threadripper for the occasional file I need to transfer to/from a retro system prior to networking working. Technically that means I'm not using the floppy driver, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are people with X58, Z77, or AM3 systems still using it for this purpose. Have to imagine for the most part people like myself have moved to USB floppy drives or floppy emulators, so probably rare but still.

[loganj]

i have completely forgot about them.
now really...if people are using old software on linux.....i wonder how come it still works since linux in general tends to break a lot of software with major release (not only kernel but also other software like gtk/qt/blah/blah/blah)

[ms178]

Some of you ever called those "diskettes" back then? We did it here in Brazil, but I don't remember reading or hearing English speakers calling those "diskettes", just "floppies".

In Germany, they are usually refered to as "Disketten" but I haven't seen the term used by English speakers at all.