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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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @07:14PM (1 child)
This just means that there is currently no dedicated individual responsible for maintaining this driver, which means if you use the get_maintainer.pl script to ask where to send patches or bug reports you will no longer get Jiri's email address. So you just send reports to the linux-block mailing list instead...
This will change again if a motivated volunteer steps up to the plate.
But it really doesn't make much difference for users, the floppy controller support is not going away from Linux. But without a dedicated maintainer, users are behooved to submit bug reports if they encounter issues (which you should do even when there is a specific maintainer).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 28 2019, @01:59AM
Thank you, I was meaning to post similarly.
And maybe the driver is pretty stable, and would only need mods to accommodate some new parameter, or driver definition somethingoranother.