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Merge floppy ioctl verification fixes from Denis Efremov. This also marks the floppy driver as orphaned - it turns out that Jiri no longer has working hardware. Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all. The old floppy disk controller is still emulated in various VM environments, so the driver isn't going away, but let's see if anybody is interested to step up to maintain it. The lack of hardware also likely means that the ioctl range verification fixes are probably mostly relevant to anybody using floppies in a virtual environment. Which is probably also going away in favor of USB storage emulation, but who knows. Will Decon reviewed the patches but I'm not rebasing them just for that, so I'll add a Reviewed-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org> here instead. * floppy: MAINTAINERS: mark floppy.c orphaned floppy: fix out-of-bounds read in copy_buffer floppy: fix invalid pointer dereference in drive_name floppy: fix out-of-bounds read in next_valid_format floppy: fix div-by-zero in setup_format_params
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I have at least one 720k 3.5" 34pin floppy drive and one 5.25" 1.2k floppy drive, although I would need to test them first... a 1440k 3.5" working drive would not be hard to scrounge up, either.
I would be happy to send them to your friend Jiri for cost of shipping (sorry, I can't cover that myself... I am of extremely limited financial means) to help continue this effort. I also have some floppy/HDD controller cards that may be of use, although all are ISA-16 interface, not PCI...
If you (or he) wants to get in touch with me, my email address is found by replacing 'star' with 'laser' in my username here, and appending Google's usual email service to the other end.
As an aside... I still have (and it still works) my first computer, and it's remarkably similar in spec to the machine you had at around the same time (c.1994 for me, about a year earlier for you, IIRC) that started it all... funny how that works.
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Iβll spot you on the shipping costs provided itβs not exorbitantβ that said whatβs the audience here? Does anyone know how many people use a physical floppy drive aka whatβs the impact of this?
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there are still, old boxes that do boot from floppy drives.
I think I can find a PCI controller for the drives and send 3.5' and 5.25' anywhere.
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I have a 1.44M 3.5" floppy drive in my old x86 machine (and it seems to work!) but I don't wanna part with it π
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I have many IDE floppy drives, if Jiri wants some.
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Can also send a drive or two, but it's understandable the driver probably doesn't need much development any longer.
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NOOOOOOOO!!! Now what will i use for swap space!! :)
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I have a 3" Amstrad drive that works with an adaptor ribbon cable on a PC so I can occasionally write ZX Spectrum +3 DSK images to real disks using http://www.seasip.info/Unix/LibDsk/ - obscure use case but works nicely with Linux...
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..pardon, but what?
IIRC FDD controllers use a 34-pin interface with a twist. :P (P unintended)
You instead mean a real IDE (that is, 40 pin) interface?
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I have built several computers in the past 3 years, an none of them have a floppy disk unit in them, although a couple of them had 2 DVD drives in them, and the latest computer I built has no DVD drive, because I built that computer for NAS use only And every one of them Computers has a Version of Linux Mint running on it
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thanks for this, i actually ran into these issues the other day and was trying to debug them.
i think a lot more people than most realise use old hardware like this, but tend not to go to upstream projects for support as we retrocomputing enthusiasts are often scoffed at when we do so.
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@starhawk64 "To this day" may be a bit of an exaggeration:
If a bug exists in both Debian and Ubuntu, go to Debian first. They really are the upstream for Ubuntu, and updates to Debian packages will automatically propagate to the latest Ubuntu version in a few months, depending on where in the Ubuntu release cycle the update happens.
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Jesus Christ! Tell Jiri to post a hackerspace address to send him/her a working floppy drive for free so he/she can pick it up from there. Else if he/she is on Dallas area there is a huge warehouse liquidation of retro computers called "Computer Reset", there will find a ton of old floppies. At https://www.facebook.com/groups/627459117730981/ can find the opening schedule.
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I still use 3.5" DD floppy disk to transfer info between my PC (with internal drive) and my Amstrad CPC, USB floppy drive are much more limited as internal ones.
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I still use 3.5" DD floppy disk too !!
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I've got one of those 8" monsters sitting around collecting dust... π
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Wow, when I beginning the GNU/Linux at the university, I used the CD and USB Flash Disk, so I have not use the floppy on GNU/Linux yet. π
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I have all the necessary hardware if somebody needs it.
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I'm an R.F. design engineer, use several computers for various developments - most of them with a floppy drive or more. PLEASE KEEP the Linix drivers for the internal drives - there are more people using these than one might realise, since most are not "computer whizzes" but use reliable and safe systems (e.g. Linux boxen) for many tasks.
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I don't think it's fair to ask a maintainer to keep working on something for free at the time they've decided to step down. It might be reasonable to reach out to him directly and offer to ship him floppy hardware for free, but from the commit description, it sounds like he's done.
The driver isn't going to disappear overnight. If it breaks in the future, you can report bugs and offer to test fixes, and that might be enough to keep it working in the future.
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Yes, floppy drives are history! But there are still many historical computers out there that are maintained and kept alive by enthusiastic people. For these people Linux is the ideal platform to transfer images to floppy disks.
Please don't let the retro computer scene hang and don't let the old computers die.
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and it's not just enthusiasts - computers with floppy drives are still heavily used in industrial and scientific applications.
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goshhhy: this is very true - and many of these machines with working and used floppy drives aren't just in corners of universities or small dedicated companies - they are out there in outfits such as NASA, ESA, aerospace companies, pharmaceutical concerns, as well as other research organisations. Many of the applications using these systems and their floppy drives simply cannot be practically transported to other systems with different storage media such as USB sticks. I'm not suggesting we go back to using feather quills and ink to write our reports on vellum, just to keep the ability to use pen and paper.
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I have lots of floppy disks. If Jiri need, I can it to him.