floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[John5342]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 21:12, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> In any case, instead of arguing semantics, can you answer my actual
> question?  How many systems hang when floppy.ko is loaded?  If it is a
> large number, it should be easy to point to lots of data.

Ok, just some very approximate stats for a group of approximately 50
computers i used to run (this was about 2 years ago and with various
linux distributions but i doubt floppy support varies much). The
computers with floppy drives enabled in the BIOS even though there was
no actual drive attached took mostly between 2 and 20 seconds longer
to boot. 2 of them (probably very broken controllers) actually took 2
minutes longer to boot. These extra boot times are far from being the
end of the world but certainly not worth inflicting on everyone to
satisfy the rare use from a tiny proportion of users.

I may be way wide of the mark but if floppy drives were enabled either
on demand or as a service in systemd could the module perhaps be
loaded later on during boot and in parallel with the rest of the boot.
That would make any potential hang completely irrelevant.

-- 
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary
and those who don't...