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

[schmidtbag]

As much as there isn't really a good reason to be using floppies in a modern kernel, they are still common and modern enough to warrant proper functionality in a modern kernel.
The last time I wrote on a floppy disk was probably a decade ago, and even back then floppies were mostly dead technology. I mostly just used them because I had plenty of them and they accomplished what I needed: portable storage of documents and recovery boot disks. But as cloud storage became available and fewer PCs came with floppy drives, I just stopped using them.

[torsionbar28]

I can't remember which dev was complaining about it, but you can't actually get raw access to any kind of floppy drive over USB. It's simply not allowed in the USB spec.

You're constrained to accessing the data over USB through an abstraction provided by the USB-attached drive itself. If you need to do ANYTHING that isn't pretty much bog-standard fat32 on the most bog-standard partitioning scheme, you're completely screwed. This is also why only 1.44MB 3.5 inch USB floppy drives exist.

^ This, exactly. It's the same reason why a SATA SSD must be on a SATA port to update the firmware. Put the SATA SSD into a USB enclosure and you can't touch the firmware any more. Even changing SMART attributes, for example, I have some HGST He8 drives that like to park the heads too often. On SATA, I can use hdparm and modify the behavior by changing a value. Put the same drive behind a SATA-USB bridge and you can no longer do this. Some of the cheaper USB enclosures won't even let you *read* the SMART data from a drive!

[krzyzowiec]

I simply don't understand some people.
This is short-sighted.

Even if YOU don't need floppies/mini-floppies/diskettes, maybe you haven't even ever touched one, that doesn't mean other people aren't using it.

Oh I have. Back when I was learning how to type on a keyboard lol. That’s why this seems so absurd to me. If you really need such support, keep around some old software to go with your old hardware.

[torsionbar28]

Oh I have. Back when I was learning how to type on a keyboard lol. That’s why this seems so absurd to me. If you really need such support, keep around some old software to go with your old hardware.

What you're proposing makes no sense. As I said earlier, it's frequently a relatively modern internet-connected PC that writes to these floppies. Then the floppy is moved to the expensive piece of scientific/medical/industrial equipment that reads the data. Or if the big machine writes to the floppy, then the PC is used to read the data and disseminate it i.e. upload it, email it, put it on a LAN.

Would you run old software on an internet connected PC? Not a chance. Would you risk a $1,000,000 piece of equipment because the PC you used to load the expensive machine with was out of date and compromised? You'd get fired from that job in an instant. You want a secure machine, i.e. with modern up to date OS and browser.

You are essentially recommending people who drive old cars, should use old expired motor oil and oil stale gasoline. It's a poor recommendation that comes from lack of understanding on how technology is used in the real world.

[Developer12]

Oh I have. Back when I was learning how to type on a keyboard lol. That’s why this seems so absurd to me. If you really need such support, keep around some old software to go with your old hardware.

Nobody is speaking in the past tense. There is a LARGE and DIVERSE amount of hardware out there in active fully-operational service that still uses floppy drives. They're talking about right now.

Thing is, as with the design loading example, at SOME POINT you need to bridge the old and new worlds. There it's a modern machine loading designs onto a floppy for older equipment.

[krzyzowiec]

What you're proposing makes no sense. As I said earlier, it's frequently a relatively modern internet-connected PC that writes to these floppies. Then the floppy is moved to the expensive piece of scientific/medical/industrial equipment that reads the data. Or if the big machine writes to the floppy, then the PC is used to read the data and disseminate it i.e. upload it, email it, put it on a LAN.

Would you run old software on an internet connected PC? Not a chance. Would you risk a $1,000,000 piece of equipment because the PC you used to load the expensive machine with was out of date and compromised? You'd get fired from that job in an instant. You want a secure machine, i.e. with modern up to date OS and browser.

You are essentially recommending people who drive old cars, should use old expired motor oil and oil stale gasoline. It's a poor recommendation that comes from lack of understanding on how technology is used in the real world.

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.

Nobody is speaking in the past tense. There is a LARGE and DIVERSE amount of hardware out there in active fully-operational service that still uses floppy drives. They're talking about right now.

Thing is, as with the design loading example, at SOME POINT you need to bridge the old and new worlds. There it's a modern machine loading designs onto a floppy for older equipment.

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.

[Nocifer]

I simply don't understand some people.
This is short-sighted.

Even if YOU don't need floppies/mini-floppies/diskettes, maybe you haven't even ever touched one, that doesn't mean other people aren't using it.
Not just for nostalgic reasons, retro computing, no there still is hardware around.
There is something called real-world industry. No, not your coder's fancy virtual software stuff. Real world. Meatspace. These folks that produce things. Or do services, production related. Such as e.g. chemistry analytics. I was just in a lab yesterday and they still had some very expensive equipment, still working, but that stuff was still equipped with a 3,5 inch diskette drive. It may seem old fashioned, but it's enough for the amount of data generated. And not everyone wants to afford a completely new HPLC, spectrometers and whatnot just because compu-tech and esp. its interfaces are advancing quickly.
So keep that in mind when you judge drivers for older hardware/interfaces.

Came here to sing my tune anyway, but I'll quote this comment because it fits well due to the "meatspace" reference.

Anyone who has seen half a cyberpunk film or read half a cyberpunk novel will be able to picture this scene: the hero has found an old data disk (a VCR/Betamax tape, a floppy disk, heck, even a CD/DVD) and a considerable amount of screen time is then expended as the hero goes through hoops and loops in order to obtain their holy grail - an obscure device form the past that can read and play back the content of said data disk.

Even if floppies were totally obsolete tech with no remaining use cases (which has been proven incorrect by the many previous comments), wouldn't it be great if Linux could become the means by which all these cyberpunk films and novels become themselves obsolete as regards to this particular part of their bleak description of the technological future? Wouldn't it be great if, say, a shadowrunner (heh :P) in the 2070s could do away with all the hoops and loops and adventures and simply pour themselves a glass of wine, boot up a Linux PC and instantly read the floppy like it was the 1970s? Preserving the functionality of old tech instead of letting it become abandonware and fade in time as most all proprietary stuff eventually do is also a goal of open source technology, is it not?

Oh I have. Back when I was learning how to type on a keyboard lol. That’s why this seems so absurd to me. If you really need such support, keep around some old software to go with your old hardware.

Why should I have to keep old software around if I can instead have modern software that properly recognizes and supports my old hardware? It's not like anyone asked you to maintain the driver yourself (and that's not a jab, just a fact). Imagine the shadowrunner in the previous example having to search for an old, obsolete Linux 5.10 tar from 2020 in order to read their floppy - wouldn't it be much easier if they could just download a modern distro carrying a modern Linux kernel instead?

[tildearrow]

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

No, thank you. Compatibility is paramount.

Would you dump your house too if there are bugs on it?

[Turbine]

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

How about we remove USB support, as there's still many USB devices which don't work?

[krzyzowiec]

Why should I have to keep old software around if I can instead have modern software that properly recognizes and supports my old hardware? It's not like anyone asked you to maintain the driver yourself (and that's not a jab, just a fact). Imagine the shadowrunner in the previous example having to search for an old, obsolete Linux 5.10 tar from 2020 in order to read their floppy - wouldn't it be much easier if they could just download a modern distro carrying a modern Linux kernel instead?

I just said it seems absurd to me. If you are already going to keep such old hardware around, what is the big deal in keeping a slightly less outdated computer and operating system to use it? Why would you search for a tar of a kernel? Just use an old OS image.

Would you dump your house too if there are bugs on it?

I think houses update faster than this tech does. In the equivalent situation, I would be using an outhouse and washing my clothes in a tub of water.

How about we remove USB support, as there's still many USB devices which don't work?

This is just nonsensical.