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Linux IT Technology

Linus Torvalds Prepares To Wave Goodbye To Linux Floppy Drives (zdnet.com) 269

Posted by msmash from the goodbye dept.
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."
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Linus Torvalds Prepares To Wave Goodbye To Linux Floppy Drives More

Linus Torvalds Prepares To Wave Goodbye To Linux Floppy Drives

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  • Whats next? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:06AM (#59017106) Homepage Journal

    Is he going to remove the headphone jack from Linux?

  • Hard to find? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert AT slashdot DOT firenzee DOT com> on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:09AM (#59017138) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

    • Interesting to note: most consumer motherboards still ship with a floppy header.

      • Re:Hard to find? (Score:5, Informative)

        by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:15AM (#59017570) Homepage

        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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gmack ( 197796 )

        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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

      • 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.

      • 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: (Score:3)

      by Thud457 ( 234763 )
      but we're still keeping support for the DC300 tape drive on the IBM 5100, right?
      Because we're gonna need that some day.

    • I haven't bought a floppy in over 20 years (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:56AM (#59017432)
      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....
      • You weren"t buying TEAC. Should've been buying TEAC.
        • they were still junky. I suppose it's possible they were fakes or B-class rejects, but the local shop was usually pretty good about that. OEM bare drives mind you but still.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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.

        • so I guess I can't complain. Wasn't most of the complexity due to them insisting on VIC-20 compatibility? Or was that just the speed issues. As I kid I desperately wanted a fast load cart but at $50 dollars it was too much (the reason we got the C64 was a family member sent us 200+ bootleg game disks, took me years to go through them all :) ).

        • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            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.

      • 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.

    • The problem though is that the quality control of the drives and media you can still buy are very low compared to their heyday; for instance the floppies you can buy won't have full slipsheets in them like they used to, you're lucky if it has even a tiny one, and there's no guarantee whatsoever that a floppy formatted/written in one brand new drive will read/write correctly in another brand new drive you bought at the same time. That's my experience at least, the last time I had to deal with even 3.5" drive

  • Leaves more drives for the Floppotron (Score:5, Informative)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:10AM (#59017144)

    We will never forget floppy drives.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • It's not hard to find USB 3.5" floppy drives to read old 3.5" media (assuming of course that the media itself still is readable, which is rare). I have some old 5.25" disks I would like to take a look at but I can't find a modern way to do it. I could try to resurrect an old 486 desktop and use that, but I would prefer to read it from a more modern PC if at all possible.

    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
    • I'm still looking for an 8" external floppy drive. If you figure out the 5 1/4 one, let us know.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by x0 ( 32926 )

        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

    • Re:Has anyone found a 5.25" external drive that wo (Score:4, Informative)

      by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:27AM (#59017232)

      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.

      • Phenom motherboards generally had floppy headers on them.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Temkin ( 112574 )

        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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:28AM (#59017648)

      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)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      What about 8" disks? :P

  • Exactly. *Historical* relics. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:37AM (#59017298) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • Settle down there grandma. USB floppy drives will still be usable, as this code has nothing to do with those.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmack ( 197796 )

      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.

      • 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.

  • ... when one has perfectly good punch cards?

  • I used a floppy on my first Linux install (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sup4hleet ( 444456 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:41AM (#59017324) Homepage

    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. :)

    • 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.

      • 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)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:41AM (#59017326)
    It says the guy maintaining the driver no longer has a working drive, not that you can't get one. It also says the guy is tired of maintaining the driver and wants to move on.

    So, if you care then you take on the mantle of floppy support. You can even call yourself Viagra if you want.
  • Couldn't a loadable driver be offered, like a kernel module or is Linux so monolithic that such a driver could not be added?

    • Re:Loadable Driver? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Average ( 648 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @11:09AM (#59017530)

      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.

      • 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 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?

    • 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)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:53AM (#59017420) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • and legacy hardware like CNC machines don't need to be upgraded to latest kernel.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        However, the (networked) machines on which floppies for CNC machines are prepared still need their security updates.

    • the controller is there but no one is using it for desktop or server, pointless waste of motherboard real estate.

  • 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.

    • Do you mean removing "device fdc" from the GENERIC kernel configuration file?

      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 :).
  • and i omit support for lots of hardware & filesystems i dont have or use, (including the floppy drive)

    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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chromal ( 56550 )
      I'm curious: what was the last version of the Linux kernel that compiled to a bootable image still small enough to fit on a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy diskette?
  • IDE hard drives? With us moving further and further into SSD territory and where we now pay about $25 per terabyte the old IDE standard is suffering.

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • This change will affect those using PATA floppy controllers made between 1986 and 2001.

      Floppy drives DO NOT adhere to the ATA standard.

  • Fond memories of 8" DSDD floppies (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @12:53PM (#59018206) Journal
    Back in the day when 'a computer' meant a 6Mhz Z80 (Z80B) processor in an IEEE696 bus computer, and having a 30MB 14" hard drive was living high, 8" double-sided double-density half-height floppy drives made by Tandon were awesome: formatted with 1024B sectors (thus cutting a lot of overhead for sector headers, but at a higher risk of data loss if a bad spot on the media developed) you'd get 1200kB out of one floppy, an awesome amount of data storage when you only had a 16b address space (62kB usable for OS and programs in my case, running CP/M v2.2; the other 4kB was the BIOS needed to interface CP/M to the rest of the world); an 8-bit Z80 program, even written in C with all the libraries added at link-time, were still small, and if your code was all assembly language, then it could be tiny; also backing up the aforementioned 30MB (26MB formatted) 14" Shugart SA4000 drive onto those 8" DSDD floppies was a little bit of a chore, but possible.
    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.

    • 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.

      • An 8" floppy has 77 tracks, as I recall, so double that for double sided. Then, if I remember correctly, you can fit 9 sectors per track if they're 1024B sectors. That comes out to a little over 1.35MB, so after subtracting the overhead on each sector (sorry can't remember how many BPS that is!) you get about 1200kB of actual data storage. Of course you have to subtract out of that Side 0 Sector 0 (the boot sector), and however much space the Directory took up (again, can't remember what that amount was in
      • Oh also remember that the 'standard' sector size for floppy disks was 128B, so the overhead would be a larger percentage overall. 256B, 512B, and 1024B sectors came later.

  • Hey, I have 30 floppy drives still in use! (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @01:43PM (#59018526)

    Granted, to make music, but they do work... I think ... well, at least their motors are still working!

  • Pretty sure I can find my old tower pc and it would still work.

  • 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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