SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Retrotechtacular: The Floppy Disk Orphaned By Linux
About a week ago, Linus Torvalds made a software commit which has an air about it of the end of an era. The code in question contains a few patches to the driver for native floppy disc controllers. What makes it worthy of note is that he remarks that the floppy driver is now orphaned. Its maintainer no longer has working floppy hardware upon which to test the software, and Linus remarks that "I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint", though he does point out that active support remains for USB floppy drives.
It's a very reasonable view to have arrived at because outside the realm of retrocomputing the physical rather than virtual floppy disk has all but disappeared. It's well over a decade since they ceased to be fitted to desktop and laptop computers, and where once they were a staple of any office they now exist only in the "save" icon on your wordprocessor. The floppy is dead, and has been for a long time.
Still, Linus' quiet announcement comes as a minor jolt to anyone of A Certain Age for whom the floppy disk and the computer were once inseparable.
Next thing, someone will be removing punched card and paper tape reader support. Where does it end?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:15PM
They have a very simplified controller that can only handle PC style floppy formats, and next to no or no error recovery capabilities.
With a normal 26 pin floppy drive there are some tricks you can do with access to the floppy port for some levels of recovery, and with the drive itself there are various flux systems to recover disks of the majority of formats out there, utilizing a standard PC compatible 5.25 or 3.5 floppy drive.
The loss of floppy drive support because 'omg bitrot might happen' is a sign of the failure of linux, after 30 years, to have any form of stable ABI. It's not like the systems that have 26 pin floppy or IDE interfaces have changed in the intervening decades. For hardware and software purposes they were almost exactly the same up until the final two or three generations of x86_64 PCs when they broke all that legacy stuff at the chipset level thanks to HPET or APIC changes which interfered. Since both AMD and Intel did it within one generation of each other, I can only assume it was collusion to try and provide an excuse to eliminate these old ports from modern systems.