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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) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @05:19PM (4 children)
I'm unsure whether Linux could find the drive. It doesn't show up in any file manager, at least by default. Hmmmm - devices? Nothing there, USB, and ATA devices, nothing like an FDC. I think the BIOS has it completely blocked. With a little research, I might be able to find and mount the disk drive, I can't say for certain.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @06:08PM (3 children)
I don't know if this will work with your kernel / distro / device name system, but it can't hurt.
Do "ls -l /dev/fd0*" in a terminal / command prompt. If /dev/fd0u1440 is there, that's it. If others are listed, they're just different device names for the same floppy drive, and they tell the driver to use whatever the format definition is based on that name.
For example, the 1440 means 1440 "blocks" which are 1024 bytes (2 sectors generally). It works out to 40 cylinders of 18 sectors on 2 sides. That's what DOS expects, although it can read other formats too.
The other dev names show the other formats possible. I think a floppy could have as many as 24 sectors per track (hence the 1920 driver name).
Way back in the day I was a glutton for punishment and had found a tiny DOS utility that would allow DOS to read and write more floppy sectors. IIRC, I would get 1.9 MB / floppy 100% reliably, and the utility could be on the first sectors of the floppy and you could run it and see the rest of the drive.
I do not miss those days.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:28AM (2 children)
$ ls -l /dev/fd0*
ls: cannot access '/dev/fd0*': No such file or directory
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:55AM (1 child)
I shoulda added, maybe ls -l /dev/fd*, but if dev 0 ain't there, ...
But some distros / kernels might use a different system altogether. Which distro + kernel version?
And you can't just turn off the floppy seek in BIOS, but leave floppy on?
But maybe you don't use floppies anymore...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 28 2019, @02:32AM
inxi
CPU: 2x 6-Core AMD Opteron 8439 SE (-MCP SMP-) speed: 2815 MHz
Kernel: 4.18.0-20.2-liquorix-amd64 x86_64 Up: 2d 6h 04m
Mem: 8930.0/24107.3 MiB (37.0%) Storage: 223.57 GiB (75.4% used) Procs: 361
Shell: bash 5.0.0 inxi: 3.0.30
I've liked the Liquorix kernel since I discovered it. :^)