Linux 5.17 Lands Fix For Hanging If Ejecting A Broken Floppy

[ssokolow]

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".

Growing up in Canada, I remember using both... of course, I was one of those nerdy kids who was reading computer magazines when his age was measured in single digits.

[ssokolow]

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.

Generally, if you're in that situation, it's better to use a "forensic/archival floppy controller" like a FluxEngine, Greaseweazle, or KryoFlux, and those rely on libusb and userland software, not kernel drivers.

(They don't make the assumptions that a traditional floppy controller makes, which copy protection schemes break, which allow them to do things like imaging a 400/800K zoned CAV GCR Macintosh floppy using a bog-standard 1.44MiB PC drive (normally used for fixed-spindle-speed MFM) by recording the raw flux transitions at high resolution and then converting in software, or imaging a copy-protected floppy with weak sectors by recording five passes of each track and writing an image that an emulator can use to randomly choose one of the five passes when a read is requested.)

The first two are even open hardware, though the FluxEngine requires closed source tools to program the $20 FPGA dev board you solder a floppy cable connector or row of pin header onto and there's enough of a problem with the $3 "Blue Pill" boards using counterfeit STM32 chips (eg. rebadgings of cheaper SKUs) that the Greaseweazle firmware includes a special test blinky you can flash to detect whether your hardware will work.

[ezst036]

And recovery companies are extremely expensive.

This.

[ssokolow]

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.

If that's what you're using it for, one of those generic drives using the USB Floppy Interface subset of the standard USB Mass Storage Device driver should work just fine. I'm lazy, so that's how I get stuff onto 1.44MiB floppies for my retrocomputing hobby and, before COVID marked everything up, they were available for $15, shipping included, from China on places like eBay and NewEgg.

(Though, if you're using them for archival, as I was before I got a forensic/archival controller, buy a couple and use them with ddrescue. Just like with vintage drives, minute calibration differences can make the difference between a disk reading or not reading and I have one USB drive that read about 95% of my non-bad disks without issue and another that can't read as many, but was great for the 5% the first one had trouble with... funny enough, the latter, which can't read as many marginal disks, seems to have the same calibration as the vintage floppy drive in my retro PC.)

[Blzut3]

If that's what you're using it for, one of those generic drives using the USB Floppy Interface subset of the standard USB Mass Storage Device driver should work just fine. I'm lazy, so that's how I get stuff onto 1.44MiB floppies for my retrocomputing hobby and, before COVID marked everything up, they were available for $15, shipping included, from China on places like eBay and NewEgg.

I will say that I've found generic USB floppy drives to be mostly miss than hit. Got two of them and both couldn't read any disk. Ended up buying an old IBM drive that works flawlessly. Also heard that older drives tend to be more likely to support 720KB media, although not sure how true that is.

With that said, I still prefer to use my LS-120 drive since it is also a 4x floppy drive (so much faster) and it being internal is slightly more convenient for me. Only catch is that if a standard drive writes to a floppy, then sometimes the disk will have to be zeroed out by a standard drive before they can read what the LS-120 drive writes. Generally not a big deal to me since I'm usually using the drive to write boot media, BIOS updates, or transferring the NIC driver, not much the other direction.

[moilami]

I am wondering what kind of nostalgy attack would happen if heard floppy disk search and read data sounds.

[ssokolow]

I will say that I've found generic USB floppy drives to be mostly miss than hit. Got two of them and both couldn't read any disk. Ended up buying an old IBM drive that works flawlessly. Also heard that older drives tend to be more likely to support 720KB media, although not sure how true that is.

With that said, I still prefer to use my LS-120 drive since it is also a 4x floppy drive (so much faster) and it being internal is slightly more convenient for me. Only catch is that if a standard drive writes to a floppy, then sometimes the disk will have to be zeroed out by a standard drive before they can read what the LS-120 drive writes. Generally not a big deal to me since I'm usually using the drive to write boot media, BIOS updates, or transferring the NIC driver, not much the other direction.

Fair. Neither of my drives have those problems and, from what I heard, it was actually "older drives tend to be less likely to support 720K floppies", but you're right about the speed.

When Cathode Ray Dude's video about faster floppy drives came out a little while ago, I used ddrescue (raw) and whatever old version of the F3 counterfeit flash detector I had kicking around and they reported my favourite drive as running at about 1.5x relative to CRD's measured speed for "standard" floppy drives.

As for the LS120's write limitation, that'd probably be the same reason 1.44M/720K intercompatibility can be spotty. Physically narrower write head having to erase wider flux transitions.

[Developer12]

Just how ignorant can Michel be? It doesn't matter how old the hardware you're trying to support is. If you have to support it, it means have a machine in your regular IT fleet with a floppy drive. That machine is used to load new data ONTO the floppies which then get used with the old equipment, and it's subject to all the same IT rules and upgrade policies.

I have an old Xeon workstation with 32 GB of RAM and a bunch of other niceties, but also a fully modern kernel and an on-motherboard floppy connector, for exactly this purpose. It runs the recent OS, connects to the rest of the infrastructure over wireguard, but is able to load files onto floppies for older equipment.

The alternative is to play chain of fools, copying the data from a modern computer to one running win7, to one runnning xp, to one running win95, to one running.....and so on. No sane IT department is going to do that.

[Mark Rose]

I'm still waiting for the floppy driver to be ported to IO_uring.

[domih]

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 France it was "disquettes"