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

[sdack]

Buy a USB floppy drive?

I assume these are just not options for users of the old floppy drives. If it was then they could equally use USB sticks, MO drives, BlueRay- and DVD-RAM/RW drives.

And with USB come security concerns, because a seemingly simple USB device could switch roles briefly, act as a keyboard and do all sorts of trickery to compromise security. Some companies simply do not allow any of these into their buildings for this reason. A floppy drive, too dumb to be anything but a storage device, then provides a more secure means of transporting data between air-gapped systems.

[cmakeshift]

I'm using a floppy drive with one of those cheap USB adapters from TEAC that I bought from China. It's connected straight to the motherboard by use of a modified cable.
It's not for anything serious, it's just for fun. I don't particularly care if the kernel removes fdd-specific code, because the adapter shows up as a SCSI device. Which is a bit annoying also, because the default behavior of udev is polling the device for media all of the time, and when no media is on the drive it makes noise non-stop. And with the polling disabled, I don't get a floppy icon on the GUI. Oh well, just rambling here. Floppy drives are fun.

[Developer12]

There is no reason to connect the PC to the internet if it's main job is to write floppies. Your analogy is inadequate. Most of the real world does stupid things like connect PCs to the internet when they don't need it.

Seems like you didn't understand me. I'm saying it's ok for your "modern machine" to be a bit out of date as well. It doesn't need to run a kernel compiled yesterday to be effective.

You're not thinking through why people are talking about "modern." Modern, because it needs to work with what's in stores if the current one breaks. Modern, because today's new machine is tomorrow's old machine.

The ongoing support is important because nothing stays new. That "floppy-writer disconnected from the internet" you're talking about? Congratulations, you're now trying to run two old machines instead of one, and need ANOTHER "modern" machine to actually use either of them.

Keep ongoing support in mainline because mainline is *the definition* of modern. Use one modern machine, replacing it with newer ones as needed, using that mainline support.

Save time and effort and money and downtime with a setup that has fewer links in the chain.