Linux Regressed Its Floppy Disk Driver - Someone Actually Noticed Just A Few Months Later

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Regressed Its Floppy Disk Driver - Someone Actually Noticed Just A Few Months Later

It turns out there is actually people running modern versions of the Linux kernel in 2021 that also are using floppy disks...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Floppy-2021-Regression

[sdack]

Can a Monday be any slower? Yes, it can!

[tildearrow]

These articles come up all of a sudden to the point sometimes I load Phoronix and I see "1 Minute Ago" and no "Add A Comment" button; even for featured ones. What happened to upcoming articles?

[krzyzowiec]

I see an easy solution to this problem. Dump the floppy drive code.

[andyprough]

Michael's love for shiny new hardware and disdain for any hardware more than 6 weeks old is always amusing.

The reason the floppy users wouldn't note an issue like this very quickly is that they are probably rarely using a new kernel. My 32-bit machine with floppy runs best with a 4.9 or at most with a 4.19 kernel. New kernels break or regress lots of old stuff. After awhile it gets fixed, and you can usually move up to a more recent LTS kernel.

[macemoneta]

"We have software still in use today that relies on this functionality"

Well, that's your problem right there.

[Developer12]

I see an easy solution to this problem. Dump the floppy drive code.

Except that modern kernel code has floppy drive users. Active users, as it turns out. So no.

[torsionbar28]

Except that modern kernel code has floppy drive users. Active users, as it turns out. So no.

Precisely, floppies are in use in a lot more places than people think. And not just in industrial applications where equipment life is measured in decades.

I've got a machine running Fedora 34 on an Opteron 1389, kernel 5.13, and yes it has a floppy drive.

[bple2137]

I see an easy solution to this problem. Dump the floppy drive code.

It's actually useful for some people to have floppy support, still. One of potential use cases that come to my mind is someone's messing around with ancient hardware (which is pretty cool thing to do if you think about it) and wants to exchange data or software with old Amiga or IBM PC - that's usually the easiest way.

[MadeUpName]

The only companies I know still running systems going back to the floppy days are banks but they are running on OS/2. I don't think any one still makes floppies and you can only use one so many times before it fails so how much use can there be? Didn't they drop the IDE code a while ago as well? They are EOLing gear 3 years old left and right these days but the floppy can never die.