RFC: re-enable auto loading of floppy driver when the PNP info says there is a floppy

[Adam Pribyl]

On Mon, 12 Apr 2010, Christopher Brown wrote:

> On 12 April 2010 21:50, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 06:38:59 +1000,
>>  Dave Airlie <airlied at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> The thing was the window where this patch applied was about 3-4 weeks in
>>> rawhide, it went in upstream, it slowed boot down on lots of my
>>> machines, I nuked it.
>>>
>>> So Fedora behaviour should not have changed across this patch.
>>
>> I think a related change was made to the Fedora udev scripts at about the
>> same time.
>>
>> I definitely noticed a change. One day I went to copy some stuff to floppy
>> and I couldn't mount the floppy drive. I eventually found out what needed
>> to be done, so it isn't a big deal for me anymore. But my machines with
>> floppy drives still don't get /dev/floppy created unless I run modprobe floppy.
>
> Which is what people who still use floppies (for some reason only
> known to themselves) can do if they need the functionality.

One good reason: there are tons of oscilloscopes and other industrial 
equipement that do their jobs pretty well, but the only way to transfer 
images is to use floppy.

Another one: Do you own or code for any "obscure" old 8bit computer? No. 
Your fault - this is a big fan. They also use floppy drives. Then the PC 
drive you can use for emulators, transfers of your code etc.

> The argument about this being required for places where they cannot
> afford flash drives or CD-RW doesn't hold much weight either as flash
> storage is so cheap and floppy disks so scarce and have such small
> capacity that floppy drives are all but useless.

And what about dropping CDROM support? This would definitely solve 
this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=453095 stupid bug which 
is bothering people for almost two years. And is also related to 
anaconda.

> -- 
> Christopher Brown



Adam Pribyl