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

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.