Floppy Driver Update Ready For Linux 6.2 - Still Being Maintained In 2023

[leech]

This is often not the case sadly. Machinery like plasma cutting tables and old CNC machines typically dont have options to install emulators or the like. Heck in my house I have an electric piano that has a floppy drive in it for midi files and there is no way to get that changed out or switched over to USB.

I think they were referring to Gotek or HxC Floppy drive emulators. The Goteks typically have a USB interface, and the HxC Floppy emulators tend to have SD cards. But they are meant to replace old floppy drives in all sorts of devices, especially old CNC machines and pianos and such.

[erniv2]

Stupid Question ?

I understand that memory leaks are annoying cause you lose ram you could use better otherwise, but this is just init code so if you unload the module you gain another kb of ram ?

Is there any real security implication ? or is it just dead unused ram that never gets used by the vmm ? Not saying that it´s bad to fix stuff like that but i just dont understand it realy.

[ssokolow]

I think they were referring to Gotek or HxC Floppy drive emulators. The Goteks typically have a USB interface, and the HxC Floppy emulators tend to have SD cards. But they are meant to replace old floppy drives in all sorts of devices, especially old CNC machines and pianos and such.

Exactly. You buy the right model for your equipment and the host device just sees it like any old floppy drive.

[stormcrow]

Exactly. You buy the right model for your equipment and the host device just sees it like any old floppy drive.

Amusingly, this is only true if you have access to the correct SD card types. What a lot of people don't realize is that, like floppies, there have been a number of versions of SD cards over the years. Newer cards may not be readable in older readers. It has nothing to do with filesystem format. Or hell, I've seen a few old cards that won't work in modern readers! Obviously the problem isn't as acute with SD cards, but you can also still purchase new 3.5" floppy drives and there still remains one last 3.5" floppy media manufacturer so long as you have a USB port, a mother board that can still recognize USB floppy drives, and/or an older system with a drive controller (which is more preferable - USB floppy drives have reliability issues I've heard. I don't know I keep an old Optiplex around for the hardware interface). Um... and an OS that doesn't die if you try to use it Most of these systems are going to be running some version of other OS than Linux, including the users that need to interact with them which is probably why the broken driver is only now being fixed. Someone ran into the problem and, unlike me, decided to diagnose and fix it in Linux rather than using a different OS.

Adding: Of course, that only applies to 3.5" floppies. If you're still needing 5.25" stuff (and I do have some!) then you're probably better off with a replacement package. Reportedly even the USAF is finally replacing their 8" floppies with card readers on their nuclear launch consoles since they started running out of the ability to replace them.

[leech]

Amusingly, this is only true if you have access to the correct SD card types. What a lot of people don't realize is that, like floppies, there have been a number of versions of SD cards over the years. Newer cards may not be readable in older readers. It has nothing to do with filesystem format. Or hell, I've seen a few old cards that won't work in modern readers! Obviously the problem isn't as acute with SD cards, but you can also still purchase new 3.5" floppy drives and there still remains one last 3.5" floppy media manufacturer so long as you have a USB port, a mother board that can still recognize USB floppy drives, and/or an older system with a drive controller (which is more preferable - USB floppy drives have reliability issues I've heard. I don't know I keep an old Optiplex around for the hardware interface). Um... and an OS that doesn't die if you try to use it Most of these systems are going to be running some version of other OS than Linux, including the users that need to interact with them which is probably why the broken driver is only now being fixed. Someone ran into the problem and, unlike me, decided to diagnose and fix it in Linux rather than using a different OS.

Adding: Of course, that only applies to 3.5" floppies. If you're still needing 5.25" stuff (and I do have some!) then you're probably better off with a replacement package. Reportedly even the USAF is finally replacing their 8" floppies with card readers on their nuclear launch consoles since they started running out of the ability to replace them.

This is why I have a stack of 2gb sd cards. 2gb is a LOT of floppy disks. Never have had a newer reader not be able to read an older card, but have had them fail on me.

[ryao]

Stupid Question ?

I understand that memory leaks are annoying cause you lose ram you could use better otherwise, but this is just init code so if you unload the module you gain another kb of ram ?

No. You need to reboot to get it back. If unloading the module gave you that memory back, it would not be a leak.

[NotMine999]

I remember when my colleague told me whilst I was shovelling floppies into my CP/M Z80 that I was out of date compared to his super shiny i386 PC compatible.

Turns out he was only half right. The floppy disk will outlive us all.

Floppies will outlive us all... just like those old Hostess Twinkies.

The new Twinkies are JUNK.

[willmore]

Every time the floppy drivers come up people keep asking why a modern kernel should care.

The answer is that any old, large equipment that *has* to use floppy drives at some point has to interact with your modern IT. That means some mid 2000's box somewhere with a floppy drive, subject to the same IT policies as everything else and thus running a modern well-supported OS. Nobody wants to play chain of fools through three different computers just to get an SVG that came in over email from a client loaded into the ancient plasma cutter.

While I agree with your logic, there is another way. You can interact with a floppy drive on a modern (USB and newer I/O only) machine without this driver at all. There are a number of devices which allow you to control a floppy mechanism with a USB microcontroller such that you can read and write discs without an actual floppy controller. The one I'm most familiar with is https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle. It allows you to graft something as simple, cheap, and readily available as a Blue Pill board to a 3.5", 5", or even 8" floppy drive to read and write media. Better yet, it has none of the sector and timing limitations of classic floppy controllers. The hardware works at the flux level and all the data format and sector encoding is done in software.

[edwaleni]

There are many legacy PBX style phone switches that came out of Y2K alive with their floppy drives intact. Some of them run Unix System V, some BSD.

Even though they could probably convert them to Asterisk running on a RaspPi by now, they soldier on.

[Developer12]

While I agree with your logic, there is another way. You can interact with a floppy drive on a modern (USB and newer I/O only) machine without this driver at all. There are a number of devices which allow you to control a floppy mechanism with a USB microcontroller such that you can read and write discs without an actual floppy controller. The one I'm most familiar with is https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle. It allows you to graft something as simple, cheap, and readily available as a Blue Pill board to a 3.5", 5", or even 8" floppy drive to read and write media. Better yet, it has none of the sector and timing limitations of classic floppy controllers. The hardware works at the flux level and all the data format and sector encoding is done in software.

You can do that, but it's not nearly as convenient as simply mounting the floppy to the filesystem as a drive.