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Data Storage Linux

Linux Kernel Fixes Longstanding Bug in Its Handling of Floppy Disks (theregister.com) 57

Posted by EditorDavid from the drives-to-succeed dept.
"Linux kernel 6.2 should contain fixes for some problems handling floppy disks," reports the Register, "a move which shows that someone somewhere is still using them." This isn't the only such fix in recent years. As a series of articles on Phoronix details, there has been a slow but steady flow of fixes for the kernel's handling of floppy drives since at least kernel 5.17, as The Register mentioned when it came out....

Back in July 2016, SUSE kernel developer Jiri Kosina submitted a patch. The problem arose because this change broke something else and later got reverted, and so the problem hung around. In July last year, he sent in a new patch that fixed it again for the 5.12 kernel, and was later back-ported to 5.10, an LTS version, and again into kernel 5.15 — another an LTS version, and the one you're running today if you're on the current Ubuntu LTS release, or something built from it such as Linux Mint 21....

Now, in December 2022, a new patch for the forthcoming kernel 6.2 fixes a memory leak that dates back to 5.11 or before.
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Linux Kernel Fixes Longstanding Bug in Its Handling of Floppy Disks More

Linux Kernel Fixes Longstanding Bug in Its Handling of Floppy Disks

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  • I really feel for whoever is still using floppies.

    • Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score:4, Informative)

      by BeerCat ( 685972 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:48PM (#63121850) Homepage

      I really feel for whoever is still using floppies.

      My optician has a peripheral vision test machine which uses floppy disks to transfer results over to the main system. A quick search shows that such pieces of kit are in the high 4-figure sum to buy (and that's a second hand one via Alibaba, so I'm guessing that a replacement is not going to be bought any time soon

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        In theory you probably can just stick a floppy disk emulator there like that gotek unless it's some really wacky proprietary floppy disk

        • Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score:4, Insightful)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @06:16PM (#63122542)

          In theory you probably can just stick a floppy disk emulator there like that gotek unless it's some really wacky proprietary floppy disk

          And then have to get it re-approved by the FDA. Or YOLO it and hope you never end up on the receiving end of a malpractice lawsuit where that device was even tangentially involved.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by keltor ( 99721 ) *
          As long as it's a Shugart interface or SCSI floppy disk, then yeah it's very doable outside medical devices where the cost to recertify the device is often not practical vs just keep using the floppy disk. Unfortunately there's tons of proprietary interfaces and the Gotek or Reactive emulators (Reactive makes a bunch of other types like MO drives which are also bad) do not always work with some devices. Our luck is about been about 75% with expensive manufacturing equipment.

        • Most of those machines are embedded, sure they run DOS but the machine itself is built around it, taking the floppy out could easily be destructive if not require recalibration.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alanw ( 1822 )

      Boeing are.
      El Reg article again [theregister.com]

    • Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score:4, Informative)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:12PM (#63121910)

      It wasn't that long ago my wife had a sewing machine that still used a floppy disk to transfer embroidery design files over from a computer.

      Talk about a racket... in terms of interface, expensive sewing machines seem to lag what a reasonable person would expect by a decade or more. I strongly expect it's a deliberate design choice, made in hopes of driving additional future sales. Recent models, like the one she bought, seem to finally make use of USB memory sticks; but her previous machine came with a floppy drive (of course there was a pricey upgrade to a CF-like-but-not-CF card reader/writer available, oh and you need their special software too).

      Side note - if you think photography can be an expensive hobby, take a look at sewing sometimes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        expensive sewing machines seem to lag what a reasonable person would expect by a decade or more

        Could it just be that floppy disks are still big in Japan [hackaday.com]? My mom has a sewing machine (think it's by Brother) that does embroidery. I think it runs Windows CE or something similar (it has a small LCD touchscreen through which it's controlled), and I'm pretty sure it has a floppy drive for moving data in and out...don't recall if it also has a USB interface or not.

    • Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score:4, Informative)

      by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:34PM (#63121972) Homepage
      Many industrial machines, who's life time is measured in decades, still uses diskettes. By fixing this, at the very least you can create backups and copies of these diskettes via Linux. Having these copies can avoid expensive and lengthy downtime.

    • I really feel for whoever is still using floppies.

      "Whoever" is any industry that has equipment which doesn't get replaced in under 20 years.

      aircraft (eg 747s)
      cnc machining
      pharmaceuticals
      embroidery and automated garment industry equipment
      etc.

      The machines are bound to the digital tech age they were created in. We shouldn't be too smug as I am sure that today's data transfer methods and protocols have shelf lives as well.

      Offtopic but lawyers and real estate agents seem to do without them while still clinging to their fax machines. My lawyer told me (with

      • Your lawyer is right up to a point in that hacking POTS is not something your average script kiddy or scammer is going to bother with these days though obviously for governments and similar actors it's a no brainer.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The point is that faxes come out of a machine on the other end and usually it's just one machine sitting in a copy room, where anyone can ... wait for it ... intercept the fax. Changing the number printed onto a fax is trivial and can be done with any PBX system. The fax could easily be digitally manipulated before printing. There is no cryptographic proof that a fax is different from any other TIFF. So, in every possible sense the fax is not secure, and is less secure than e-mail because efforts have been

        • POTS is easy to subvert and has only security by obscurity. When you send a fax you have no assurance at all that it went to the desired destination thanks to call forwarding. Likewise a received fax sender identification relies caller id and then sending machine machine configuration, both of which are worthless. The data is unencrypted, readable by anyone.

          POTS, fax, and security in the same statement is a not funny joke. A scammer needs zero technical knowledge.

          As far as I can tell, lawyers and real

      • Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score:4, Insightful)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @06:31PM (#63122576)

        Offtopic but lawyers and real estate agents seem to do without them while still clinging to their fax machines. My lawyer told me (with a straight face) that fax is more secure than email and that you can't fake where the fax came from, intercept it, or redirect where it is going to.

        Real reason, besides just plain old inertia, is that faxes are written into the law as acceptable forms of communication and that comes with certain legal advantages, so they stick around. This is also why, despite the "news" articles decrying their death, telegrams are still alive and kicking. They were written into the law ages ago and are still sometime advantageous due to the level of trust granted to the telegram companies back in the day. For instance cancelling contracts between companies is one thing they are still used for since the time stamp on a telegram is considered virtually indisputable legally.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by keltor ( 99721 ) *
          Sometimes they make the laws that apply to the information contained apply differently.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I really feel for whoever is still using floppies.

      We haven't really gone too many years without the floppy.

      I mean, we were still using it well into the 00's, and many longer lived pieces of equipment probably are in the prime of their useful lives and originally started with floppy disks.

      I mean, people complain aircraft use them - but I'm sure a 747 made in the 2000-2005 era is perfectly airworthy today and flying, even though its navigation system updates are floppy based. You have to remember they were on

    • Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score:5, Informative)

      by wik ( 10258 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @06:34PM (#63122588) Homepage Journal

      Hey, floppies were a great start! I came home from computer camp in 1994 with parts of a Slackware Linux distribution on 40 floppies. I was excited... my parents not so much. The compiler package fit on a whole 10 1.44MB disks and you could load up a usable system on top of a FAT16 filesystem (with metadata for long file names/unix permissions) if you didn't want to take the plunge and re-partition your hard disk.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )

      I really feel for whoever is still using floppies.

      I bought a USB based floppy drive, just in case. :-)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Askmum ( 1038780 )
      Well, Linix is.
      I remember upgrading from idk 16.04 to 18.04 or something and after the upgrade my system wouldn't boot. It did boot in recovery mode and I could go on from there, but that's not a stable situation.
      After long searches and looking through the syslog I saw that it wanted to initialize or access the floppy drive. Why, I don't know, because there was no floppy drive, also not one configured in the BIOS and there had never been a floppy drive on that system.
      After removing the floppy drive from

    • I had old floppies that I needed to archive. No operating machine with a floppy drive. And although I could cannibalize floppy drives from old dead machines, current machines do not support the interface. You can buy a USB floppy drive. But guess what, they are extremely buggy and don't actually work half the time.

  • Who needed this? (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:44PM (#63121842)

    How about some priorities? I've been waiting decades for the linux kernel to support for my bubble memory system, and they've been wasting time on floppy disks! Jeeze.

    • Some guy at SUSE submitted a patch to correct the problem he had with floppies, and someone at the kernel accepted it. Until YOU submit a patch to correct the problem YOU have, then nobody is wasting their time on that. Except for me wasting useful time replying to that sort of comment.

    • The real joke is the kernel has floppy drivers/code in it. So much stuff needs to be removed from the kernel and evolved...

      WTF? can't this become some kind of FUSE plug-in? (yes i know, driver...go find a usb floppy and have user space drive it.)

      I seriously hope somebody gets us microkernel features... to move us into the future. People complain about performance with overhead changes but we've gone to virtual machines and virtual devices and abstraction layers, protected memory used to be too slow, oh

    • Or making PulseAudio actually work?

    • Year of Linux on desktop!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Year of Linux on desktop!

        Year of GUI Linux on the Windows desktop and the macOS desktop, via WSL2 and Virtualization Framework.

        Not quite what we were expecting but at least its finally here.

        • Year of GUI Linux on the Windows desktop and the macOS desktop, via WSL2 and Virtualization Framework.

          Not quite what we were expecting but at least its finally here.

          #Fry Not sure if joking, not getting the joke or being serious.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            Year of GUI Linux on the Windows desktop and the macOS desktop, via WSL2 and Virtualization Framework. Not quite what we were expecting but at least its finally here.

            #Fry Not sure if joking, not getting the joke or being serious.

            Mostly joking, offering a new spin on the old joke. A spin pointing out a new reality that few expected.

  • At least it stopped kernel panicing... (Score:3)

    by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:49PM (#63121862)

    when you remove a floppy without unmounting it first...
    That would have been in one of the 0.x kernels IIRC. Before the aout to ELF change.

    Happened to me so many times, application finished reading from the floppy, I pull the floppy to put the next one in... kernel panic...

  • Printing from the Arduino's IDE make about 7 huge characters per page.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

      To do that, they'd have to port it from Java to something that works properly.

      In the meantime, you could switch to PlatformIO on VSCodium. It's worked for all of my embedded coding needs across multiple platforms, including Arduino.

  • After scanning this, I went down memory lane in my head. I switched to Linux in 2001, and I can't recall ever mounting a floppy for anything.

    That kind of surprises me.

  • And they're patching a floppy disk bug. :(

    Maybe by 2060 Linux will finally have a cohesive desktop that can actually compete with Microsoft Windows.

    • Maybe by 2060 Microsoft will stop blackmailing OEM manufacturers into keeping Linux off the desktop. Meanwhile mobile is either Apple or Android.

    • Maybe by 2060 Microsoft will finally have a cohesive desktop that can actually compete with MacOS.

      FTFY.

  • People in Japan still use floppies as they feel they are more reliable and trustworthy. I think the article was on Slashdot.

  • Huh. Another one of my stories makes the /. front page. Wooo etc. :-)

  • Really? I would have fixed some more 8mportan bug first!

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