Linus Torvalds Prepares To Wave Goodbye To Linux Floppy Drives (zdnet.com) 269
Freshly Exhumed writes: When Linus Torvalds first created Linux in 1991, he built it on a 386-powered PC with a floppy drive. Things change. In 2012, Torvalds bid the i386 processor adieu saying, "I'm not sentimental. Good riddance." Now, it's the floppy drive's turn to bid Linux adieu. Torvalds has declared the floppy drive project "orphaned." Why? Because floppy drives have become historical relics. No one's using them. Indeed, Jiri Kosina, the Czech Linux kernel developer in charge of the floppy drive driver, said he "no longer has working hardware." Torvalds continued, "Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all."
Whats next? (Score:5, Funny)
Is he going to remove the headphone jack from Linux?
Re:Whats next? (Score:5, Funny)
Is he going to remove the headphone jack from Linux?
Linus is under pressure to remove the replaceable battery, in order to make Linux thinner.
This will mean that when your battery doesn't charge any more . . . you will need to buy a new Linux!
Re: Whats next? (Score:2)
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He lives on the west coast, that is definitely a form of wave here.
We call it "freedom."
Hard to find? (Score:5, Informative)
Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find
No it's not, i have several floppy drives floating around and some working disks, and i recently bought a floppy drive on ebay to replace a faulty one and there were hundreds to choose from. I also still have an Amiga with working floppy drives and lots of working disks.
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Well, then send some to the ex-maintainer of the linux floppy driver, along with a big thank you to be working on these, and maybe he will continue to maintain it.
Or start maintaining it yourself.
*Real* (non-emulated) FDDs are *exceedingly rare* on anything that needs to run Linux and was manufactured in the last 10 years. So, enthusiasts of legacy hardware must take up the mantle and keep the software from bitrotting.
From what I read on the email from the floppy driver maintainer (i.e. first-hand, not sec
Re:Hard to find? (Score:4, Informative)
Besides the drivers have been written... floppy drives will not change so what gives?
The kernel changes around the drivers. At some point there will be a breaking API change in the kernel that requires all drivers to be updated and at that point, without a maintainer, the floppy driver will cease to function. Even more likely is that the floppy driver will break some time before then because it relies on a behaviour internal to the kernel, behind the API, that changes.
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Interesting to note: most consumer motherboards still ship with a floppy header.
Re:Hard to find? (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting to note: most consumer motherboards still ship with a floppy header.
What stone age shop are you buying your motherboards from? I've not seen a motherboard with a floppy header in 10 years.
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Same here. I'm still using my MSI P43 NEO3-F (MSI-7514) motherboard from 12/27/2008 for my Debian box. Even though it still has a working 3.5" disk drive. I rarely used it and KDE v4.1.x seems to have problems reading it. It was a pain in the arse to access it compared to Windows. My newer motherboard (EVGA X58 SLI (132-BL-E758; BIOS date 5/11/2010; v6.00 PG; release number IX58SZ64); couple years old later) doesn't have one. I do have an old used Toshiba notebook, that came with Windows 98, had a working f
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Are you sure it's the floppy header? I just checked my transaction history and none of my last 5 motherboard purchases include floppy headers and that's even checking the replacement am3+ motherboard for my ancient AMD Phenom II CPU. Almost all of them had PS/2 Ports, a few of them had LPT, most had serial, but no floppy header.
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The last 3 generations of intel chipset lack the 8237 dmac which is required for the XT/AT floppy controller. So there's no reason to include a header for something that can't work.
Not in years (Score:2)
Interesting to note: most consumer motherboards still ship with a floppy header.
"Most"? Definitely not. While I'd imagine there are some out there I haven't seen one in quite a while. Certainly not on anything made in the last 10 years. Nobody uses them so motherboard manufacturers aren't going to go to the expense of putting stuff on the board that won't be used.
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Holy shit. I guess you're posting this from your cutting edge Pentium 3? Because that was about the last time I saw a floppy connector as "standard" on a motherboard. Most P4 south-bridges did not include support for a floppy drive.
Re: Hard to find? (Score:2)
Most P4 south-bridges did not include support for a floppy drive.
Yeah, they did; just not the p.o.s. OEM models you were exposed to.
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Also, the PS/2 mouse/keyboard port is actually just a serial port. So the hardware support for RS232 is free. They just have to add the header. And bonus deal, they can use that header to test the serial hardware for the PS/2 port. So thankfully it is likely to stick around for awhile.
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Because we're gonna need that some day.
I haven't bought a floppy in over 20 years (Score:5, Interesting)
The Amiga drive works because it sold for $200-$500 new (depending on when you bought it) so it was built like a bloody tank. I don't have it anymore but I'd bet money my Commodore 1541 still works. It came in a discount pack on clearance in 88 and it was still $200 bucks.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's not enough to be able to find them, they have to be of good enough quality for regular use. Maybe if you're also a hardware guy that doesn't mind realigning the heads periodically....
Re: I haven't bought a floppy in over 20 years (Score:2)
I was (Score:2)
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Your 1541 drive probably doesn't work any more, chances are the grease needs replacing and maybe some capacitors replacing. It was a complex beast.
The Amiga drives were generally pretty decent, and fairly simple. With maintenance they can last a very long time.
Grease & Caps is pretty basic maintenance (Score:2)
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It would need to have been made before the early 70s for it to be at all likely to have bad capacitors.
Lubricants, sure. That's a maybe at least. But the grease should be fine. It is the lighter weight stuff in the spindle that would be the problem, not the thick stuff for the head movement.
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There were plenty of bad caps about in the early 80s too. Sometimes due to design flaws too, as they were less robust back then. One example would be Mac power supplies. There is one cap in those that always dies sooner or later.
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but even then they weren't very good quality. They could only seem to read the disks they wrote and were junk in a year. To be fair it was $15 in, like, 1995. But still.
The Amiga drive works because it sold for $200-$500 new (depending on when you bought it) so it was built like a bloody tank. I don't have it anymore but I'd bet money my Commodore 1541 still works. It came in a discount pack on clearance in 88 and it was still $200 bucks.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's not enough to be able to find them, they have to be of good enough quality for regular use. Maybe if you're also a hardware guy that doesn't mind realigning the heads periodically....
My Apple 2e floppy drives work just fine.
But the CFFA3000 emulating them in hardware from a USB stick is much more convenient.
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And where would that be?
In first world countries there are sites like ebay, with hundreds of traditional floppy drives for sale as we speak. There are also things like garage sales where people find some old machine that's sat around for years.
In third world countries, old hardware is still in widespread use - including floppies.
Leaves more drives for the Floppotron (Score:5, Informative)
We will never forget floppy drives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Has anyone found a 5.25" external drive that works (Score:2)
I have found one vendor who claims to have a solution [deviceside.com] but you're realistically looking $75-100 to implement their solution, and that
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I'm still looking for an 8" external floppy drive.
While there aren't hundreds to choose from, I regularly find Shugart 801 and 851 drives on eBay. Whether what you get works or not...
:-)
I just got an 801 for my Altair 8800.
m
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Re:Has anyone found a 5.25" external drive that wo (Score:4, Informative)
The 5.25 and 3.5 connectors are electrically the same - just one is pins, one is an edge connector. All you need is a computer with a floppy header on the mainboard (Old, but not 486-old) and an ancient, ancient floppy drive ribbon cable. The ones you want have both 3.5" and 5.25" edge-connector on the cable, so you can use them with either drive.
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Phenom motherboards generally had floppy headers on them.
Not working (Score:2)
...and then not manage much beyond getting the drive to spin.
5 1/4 and 3 1/2 have slightly different organisation (as the shape might suggest), and the drive is pretty dumb. The controller need to "explainlikeimfive" to the drive every stepper motor movement, and decode the raw signal coming out.
Unless the USB controller was specifically designed to be able to handle 5 1/4 too (very unlikely in a 3 1/2 USB drive), it will not do the proper ritual dance to get the data out of the drive.
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Unfortunately, no. The drive controller needs to support ye olde floppy drive too, which a USB-floppy controller will not.
I have a working 8" Drive/Any sources for Discs? (Score:2)
To do with the S100 CPM system I built in University (1984-1985) and the 8" discs and drive were becoming relics then.
The 8" discs that I have are the real problem - their sleeves are cardboard (not plastic like 5.25" discs) and are on their last legs.
Well, when the discs finally disintegrate my wife will be happy that I have no reason to keep the old hardware around.
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To do with the S100 CPM system I built in University (1984-1985) and the 8" discs and drive were becoming relics then.
The 8" discs that I have are the real problem - their sleeves are cardboard (not plastic like 5.25" discs) and are on their last legs.
Well, when the discs finally disintegrate my wife will be happy that I have no reason to keep the old hardware around.
I never finished mine. still have some unfinished IMSAI S-100 backplane boards in a box somewhere. Courtesy of Mike Quinn himself.
I worked for a US Govt agency in the early 90's, and they still had hard sector 8 inch hard sector disks in use for some old science equipment. PDP-11's actually... There were 8 inch disks that made the jump to plastic sleeves. It's just most abandoned the tech as it happened.
Re:Has anyone found a 5.25" external drive that wo (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the newer USB floppy drives you find on the market are junk. They're based off of a very cheap mechanism and are clearly build as low cost as possible. They often don't work out of the box, have trouble reading disks, and fail quickly if they do work.
A while ago Sony made a USB floppy drive that is pretty much the best floppy drive I've ever used. I bought one when they were current and it works to this day. They're recognizable by their bright blue, black, or white interchangeable face-plates and the "2x" speed. The model number is mpf88e-(something). Search ebay for mpf88e.
I bought another one recently off ebay for use because I have a lot of retro and legacy computer projects. Works fantastic.
Another very good option, though strange, is floppy drive modules from Dell laptops from the early 2000s. A lot of them have a little USB jack on the one side that let them be used as external devices if you, say, have a CD drive in the bay. These are GREAT drives and are extremely reliable. One model number I'm aware of is the Mpf82e.
Now a note about USB floppy drives - The USB floppy protocol is a special subset of the USB mass storage protocol explicitly designed for these types of devices. They ONLY allow block level access to HD floppy disks and that is it. No low level control, no low density floppy disks. Real floppy hardware is low level and pretty raw, so clever direct access can use it to read and write things that are way out of the usual floppy spec. For anything other than HD floppy disks accessed in a mostly standard way, you need real floppy hardware.
Now, if you need a floppy drive for an older system there are some great alternatives to real floppies and drives. There are cheap floppy emulators on ebay that use a usb stick to store floppy images. Search for gotek floppy emulator on ebay. - Thought the default firmware on these is not great. If you really want an amazing device mod it with the flashfloppy firmware
https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki
It adds functionality that lets it emulate many many drives for many many systems (Like Amigas or Roland keyboards). Adds greatly enhanced interface and image support. Adds support for hardware mods like an OLED display, speaker for fake floppy sounds, extra buttons and a rotary encoder. Really worth the effort if you want to make easy use of old computers.
8"! (Score:2)
What about 8" disks? :P
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Maybe I am missing something, but the deviceside solution is $55. I don't see the problem.
Because real hackers will waste $300 worth of their time in order to avoid paying $55 for an easy solution.
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Because real hackers will waste $300 worth of their time in order to avoid paying $55 for an easy solution.
Always.
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Ribbon cable, but not ATA. The floppy drive interface is actually remarkable dumb - there's practically nothing going on in the drives at all, they are just mechanical. Raw bits in and out, stepper motor commands in. All the intelligence is in the controller.
Wont work for 5.25" (Score:2)
The USB devices are extremely *high level*.
They present themselves as block devices (as in OS just asks for LBA sector #473, and gets it, as if it was a (very slow) USB flash key) and handle the drive mechanics themselves.
Floppy drives on the other hand are extremely *low-level* (The actual floppy controller is on the motherboard): Wires to control the stepper motors, wires to fetch what the head is currently reading, etc. The computer (or more precisely the floppy controller on anything more sophisticated
Detection (Score:2)
How does the controller know whether it's a 3.5"or a 5.25" drive though?
An ugly combination of the user putting the correct setting for the drive type into the CMOS in the BIOS Setup screen (and/or module parameters in Linux [kernel.org]), and auto [os2museum.com] detection [slashdot.org].
Also note that the first sector on the first track might contain additional information about the floppy, depending on the file system used (e.g.: FAT), at least once you're able to decode it.
It's just two heads, and density select and an on/off motor control. I'm sure we get MFM data at the same rate from both as well.
The number of tracks to scan/step through changes between disk-types (40 or 80) and thus their spacing too.
The content of said track varies too :
Exactly. *Historical* relics. (Score:4, Interesting)
Who knows how much history is sitting on floppy disks somewhere? How many peoples' life work?
This same process is apt to obsolete many other kinds of removable media like mag tape, and eventually most recordable optical media. Why bother maintaining that DVD-RAM code when cloud storage is so convenient and wireless networking ubiquitous?
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Fortunately the driver won't stop working, at least not immediately. The bigger issue is finding hardware that actually supports floppy disks. There are USB 3.5" drives but not 5.25" or with support for many non-DOS formats.
I still use floppy disks regularly, but only for old machines where they are the simplest and quickest way to transfer files. Because I can't read the disks on more modern machines if I need to get data off I either use an old machine to copy to 3.5" drive or use a serial cable to get th
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Good luck with that. A few years back, I found a plastic protective box with a bunch of my stuff from high school and bought a USB floppy drive to see what was there. They were 80% unreadable. Floppies were never end of problems when they were new. I'll not forget doing a software install only to find out that out of 16 disks, one was dead.
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USB Floppy drives are also a lot worse at reading old disks. I bet at least half of that 80% would be readable on a 20-year old non-USB floppy drive.
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The only floppy with better density used out of density available than 180k/side 5.25" floppy is a similar format on an 8" floppy.
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Sure, that's the sensible thing to do. What's not sensible is thinking that people doing the sensible thing will preserve all the data that needs preserving.
Who needs floppies.... (Score:2)
... when one has perfectly good punch cards?
I used a floppy on my first Linux install (Score:5, Interesting)
Waaay back in 1999 I installed Redhat 5.1 on a 486 dx4 100mhz PC. Had to use floppy because the CDROM was so old it wasn't ATAPI. It took a while to compile a kernel in those days. Linux was so cool because all you needed was any old PC, a 3C905 ethernet card and you could have a web/email/ftp/ssh/file/print/etc server up and running after only a couple hours of swearing. :)
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I was so happy to replace Win95 on homebuilt whitebox of mine (AMD K6-2 on a motherboard with an AT keyboard port) with Caldera's OpenLinux back in 1999. I had a printer that worked with the software, a nice PCI modem that had Linux support for dialup, and I happily used KDE for a couple of years until I decided I needed Windows for some games that I wanted. Those were good times. Exciting times, even.
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Hah! A white box K6-2 (350) was also my first Linux box... also in 1999! Good stuff. IIRC I used Redhat 6.2 (6.1?) and never looked back.
I had a 2 GB HDD in it partitioned to something like 1.4GB because after that point there was some damage on the disk that would corrupt any file system that extended over it.
Coming from Windows 95, the stability was an absolute breath of fresh air.
That's not what the article says (Score:5, Informative)
So, if you care then you take on the mantle of floppy support. You can even call yourself Viagra if you want.
Loadable Driver? (Score:2)
Re:Loadable Driver? (Score:5, Informative)
The code isn't going anywhere. Just being marked as unmaintained. As in, 'we broke /dev/fd0' isn't going to be a show-stopper in a future release.
The kernel tree has all sorts of unmaintained drivers in it. https://github.com/torvalds/li... [github.com] is a network driver for an ISA bus Apple LocalTalk network card I dealt with around 1997. The driver hasn't had any real changes to code in the 21st century... few autoclean bots have been in there but that's it. No distro would bother pre-compiling a module for you. But, it's still in the tree, and so will /dev/fd0.
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Now maybe everybody here can go explain to all the linux "news" rags what 'orphaned' means.
But, hey, maybe all the publicity will shake loose a maintainer.
My goodness I haven't used my PhoneNET PC card since I needed to use a MacIP gateway to get Internet in college! Thank goodness for Asante and Shiva bridges.
There used to be a joke (Score:2)
There was some program that regularly seeked your diskette drive when running Linux. The idea was that if you ran Linux you rarely rebooted your machine, nor did you have to use the diskette drive as you have a network stack. So in order to reduce the build-up of dust on your drive it would seek from time to time.
I'm actually more worried about the people who still have to run Windows. What will they do when they cannot get diskette drives? How will they install the driver for their USB-thumbdrive?
USB mass storage driver included since Win2k (Score:2)
I'm actually more worried about the people who still have to run Windows. What will they do when they cannot get diskette drives? How will they install the driver for their USB-thumbdrive?
A USB floppy drive (1440 KiB or LS-120), Zip drive, and flash drive pose no problem for Windows 2000 and later, which include the USB mass storage driver.
Historical note: The joke relates to the omission of this driver from Windows 98. But Windows 98 was the first version of Windows not to fit on a handful of floppies. Thus makers of peripherals for Windows 98 could be reasonably certain of their users having a CD-ROM drive. Some flash drives from the era bundled the driver on an 8 cm CD, not a floppy.
Hard to find hardware? (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. There's still plenty of PC motherboards with onboard floppy controllers.
On the other hand, this should affect few people, because there's probably not a lot of Linux software which can only run from floppy. If FreeDOS dropped floppy support it would be a big problem, because there's probably lots of CNC machines out there which will only run from floppy. The actual floppy drive can be emulated with a hardware emulator, but you still need to use the floppy interface.
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and legacy hardware like CNC machines don't need to be upgraded to latest kernel.
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However, the (networked) machines on which floppies for CNC machines are prepared still need their security updates.
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the controller is there but no one is using it for desktop or server, pointless waste of motherboard real estate.
FreeBSD (Score:2)
This isn't just Linux, FreeBSD is actively exploring removing their floppy driver too as of the past couple weeks. Just something to keep in mind for those that may think of swapping OSes to keep the legacy feature.
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Because I am happy If the source is still there and I can recompile the kernel with that option.
Do not to worry; there will be no mass migration to FreeBSD because of floppy support
i been rolling my own kernel for a while (Score:2)
and if i ever need something i can rebuild the kernel in a few minutes
after you've done this enough times navigating around menuconfig has become an easy and boring routine, but i do like the results of a slimmer and leaner kernel custom made for my daily driver
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When will they stop supporting (Score:2)
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Not for some years yet. IDE still has a lot of use in industrial and embedded systems - though it may well be a compactflash card in IDE-emulation mode.
LITERALLY NOBODY RTFA (Score:2)
Holy crap are there a ton of people getting on here and talking and VERY FEW actually reading what was written.
USB FLOPPY DISK DRIVES ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT AND ARE NOT, I REPEAT NOT BEING REMOVED!!
This change will affect those using PATA floppy controllers made between 1986 and 2001.
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Floppy drives DO NOT adhere to the ATA standard.
Fond memories of 8" DSDD floppies (Score:3)
This is all what I refer to as 'when computers were still fun'. Mainly because of the discovery of it all, and how simple and easy it was to sit down and write something that did what you wanted it to do. Also because the majority of the hardware I was running was built by me, from bare PCBs and a box of components, not just bought at a store and bolted into an enclosure. The closest thing we have these days so far as experience-of-use goes are microcontrollers, and maybe RPi. Most of the wonder and discovery have gone out of it, and computers are almost as much an 'appliance' as your TV or your toaster.
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Woh, that's quite some storage on an 8" floppy. I seem to remember getting something like 100k on the 8 inch disks on my LSI-11, clearly they weren't pushing the tech very hard.
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Hey, I have 30 floppy drives still in use! (Score:3)
Granted, to make music, but they do work... I think ... well, at least their motors are still working!
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Granted, to make music, but they do work... I think ... well, at least their motors are still working!
So are you the builder of the Floppotron or just an imitator?
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Well, mine can read sheet music.
Hmm, should have some (Score:2)
floppy market is still alive (Score:2)
if only for retro computer users/collectors/fans.
ofcourse, most of these old computers can't run linux, but still to say that the medium is dead, is not true.
i know that a lot of people also replace their drives with usb devices (like a gotek), but just get on youtube and watch the many videos detailing how to maintain and/or repair your floppy drive.
now, i'm not saying floppies are any good, i'm happy that i don't have to use them anymore, but on a retro 8/16 bit computer there is something special about k
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Just in case (Score:2)
I have a USB 3.5" floppy drive in my junk box.
Same here. I haven't thrown it out because I haven't needed to and you just know that I would need it 20 seconds after throwing it out. But I haven't actually used a floppy disk in close to 15 years and I've definitely thrown out all the disks I owned many years ago. Floppy disks stopped being useful/practical sometime in the mid-90s when program sizes started substantially exceeding their capacity. I remember installing Windows and OS/2 circa 1995 off of something like 20+ floppy disks. When CDs repla
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In most Old Machinery you will not be expecting nor is it recommended to be using the newest Operating Systems.
Other then removing old hardware support that it just filling up space, and can be a security bomb waiting to go off. But also areas on how hardware performance have increased are different across different components.
With NvME Solid State Drives having the OS read from disk, is now much less of a hassle then it would be on a 486 running on a Western Digital 200meg drive, that clicks like crazy wh
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Other then removing old hardware support that it just filling up space, and can be a security bomb waiting to go off.
No... modern systems don't have a floppy drive controller; there's no way to hot add a floppy drive controller to a motherboard, and /dev to allow that...
user code cannot interface through or talk to the floppy driver unless the driver detects the controller hardware, loads, and a device node is made within
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I slipped a floppy emulator into the second bay of my old computer. Now I can copy real floppies onto a USB flash. And the flash can hold an excessive number of floppy images that I can select on a 2 digit panel.
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Haven't seen that old pasta for quite a while.
Well, he's been keeping on a floppy disk, but since that is no longer being maintained, he needed to get it out of there ASAP.
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To boot old computers
You wouldn't want to use a new distro on an old computer.
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To boot old computers
You wouldn't want to use a new distro on an old computer.
It depends on how base the security flaws are in the old distro. I do think there ought to be a fork or something for an operating system that supports really old hardware. Assuming there is a enough of an interested user base to keep it going.
NetBSD/i386 8.1 still runs correctly on a 486 and supports the PC's floppy disk controller (fdc) [netbsd.org]. Maybe the old die hard legacy computer enthusiasts need to switch away from Linux and onto NetBSD?
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If there were enough interest to get somebody to maintain the driver, then the driver would stay in the kernel. The only reason for removing it is that after a while nobody knows if unmaintained, untested code still works (due to changes in other code that it interacts with). Forks don't fix the problem of not being able to find a maintainer.
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There has to be interest from someone capable of doing the work. There might be plenty of hobbyists that aren't able to maintain a kernel driver.
Forks do fix a problem of policy for a project. If you have decentralized priority setting like on Linux, then things that are not popular enough to warrant interest tend to go away. The constant churn of internal driver APIs on Linux also makes a proper maintainer essential. A different kernel architecture or simply a forked project with different goals would not
Re:I just used the floppy driver a few months ago. (Score:5, Informative)
They're not removing support for USB floppy drives. How long has it been since FDD connectors were even included on motherboards? If people need to use a floppy disk with modern Linux, a USB floppy drive seems a perfectly aceptable alternative.
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I have a Core 2 Quad system just old enough to have an FDD connector. I have an old floppy drive for recovering data from floppy disks. It runs Linux. Modern USB floppy drives often can't read badly aged disks written from older drives.
Re:I just used the floppy driver a few months ago. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a Core 2 Quad system just old enough to have an FDD connector. I have an old floppy drive for recovering data from floppy disks. It runs Linux. Modern USB floppy drives often can't read badly aged disks written from older drives.
Nor can they read non-"standard" formats, reportedly including 5.25" drives. I have many floppy drives, and some will read certain disks, but not others, so it's best to keep an assortment to recover old but important data. I will always keep older motherboards around with floppy, ISA, etc., and older Linux with floppy support. I should advertise a recovery service.
Re: I just used the floppy driver a few months ago (Score:4, Funny)
Nor can they read non-"standard" formats, reportedly including 5.25"
Have you tried folding them?
~decade ago (Score:2)
How long has it been since FDD connectors were even included on motherboards?
The most recent motherboard I have with one is a Gigabyte MA790FX DQ6 [gigabyte.com] which is an AM3/AM2+/AM2 compatible motherboard (with DDR2), this thing runs all the way up to the predecessor of Zen, but still has a Floppy header.
(But on the other hand, Gigabyte kept releasing BIOS-based motherboard well into the era when every-body else was doing UEFI firmware + CSM)
I even have a 5 1/4 floppy drive that I can plug into this. (I am a magpie for old tech from my childhood).
But well, given the rarity of the hardware, it
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And this has no relevance on the discussion, since a usb floppy doesn't use the driver in discussion.