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I remember when linux came on a floppy disk. I just read that the linux floppy-disk controller code is being orphaned. Things change.

• fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Being orphaned because floppies are not common enough any more for developers to continue to "support" them. But why should floppy code need to be updated when the hardware itself has been stable for decades?
  • 8organicbits 3y ago
    It looks like there's been a number of changes in recent years including bug fixes. Kudos to the people providing the support. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/0dd3ee31125508cd67f7e7172247f05b7fd1753a/drivers/block/floppy.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/0dd3ee31125508cd67...
    • fuzzfactor 3y ago
      That is significant. I've got to admire the maintainers stepping up to the plate for this. It does look like so many changes have been gradually made to other things while neglecting this most fundamental boot device, that now a bit of catching up would be needed to eliminate new technical debt when it comes to details where the long-standing floppy code might have had defect-free performance in the past. I wonder how changes like this would affect bootability, or accessibility of non-floppies like HDD, USB, SSD when formatted floppy-style without partitioning? How many different boot devices are there anyway? Would a loss of one forever reduce the number of choices unthinkingly? I always thought floppy performance was engineered to be highly reliable before moving on to more complex filesystems and hard drives in the 1990's.