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

As we get ready to enter 2023, the Linux kernel's floppy disk driver is still being maintained.

Ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window next week -- in working towards the Linux 6.2 stable release around February as what will be the first major Linux release of 2023 -- there is still some attention being paid to the floppy driver.

Denis Efremov submitted a floppy driver pull request to Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe of the driver updates for Linux 6.2. Floppy driver updates are seldom but still seemingly cared about for the latest kernel code.

With Linux 6.2, the floppy driver is resolving a memory leak in its initialization path when calling floppy_alloc_disk() fails.

This memory leak with the floppy disk driver has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11 back in 2020. It's mostly been fixes to the floppy driver in recent years. Earlier this year was disabling FDRAWCMD access with a use-after-free vulnerability, a hang if ejecting a broken floppy, and other fixes in recent years.

The floppy driver memory leak fix is now part of the pull of block driver changes ready for Linux 6.2 and is also marked for back-porting to current Linux kernel stable series.