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

Matthew Garrett mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
Tue Aug 30 12:41:57 UTC 2011


On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 06:50:11AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 03:33:04 +0200,
>   Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> > 
> > No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe it 
> > manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe it 
> > for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about it 
> > were ignored or declared NOTABUG.
> 
> There was significant discussion about this issue on the mailing lists
> and Kyle thought he had a good solution to having the floppy drive
> recognized when it was there and not adding long delays to the boot up
> for people with incorrectly configured (your supposed to disable the floppy
> drive in the bios when you don't have one) or broken bios. I am not sure
> what happened with the implementation of the solution.

ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines 
will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives 
attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of 
drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely 
havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded, 
which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.

The "easiest" solution would be to fix the floppy driver to probe in the 
background but I suspect most people would prefer to empty biohazard 
containers full of used needles by hand than touch floppy.c.

> > 
> > Similarily, analog joystick support (yes, those joysticks you plug on the 
> > MIDI ports of those old sound cards) also has to be modprobed manually.
> 
> I also have a gamepad which is like a joystick and need to do
> modprobe analog to get it recognized.

There's no way to get any feedback from the gameport driver as to (a) 
whether there's anything plugged in, or (b) what is plugged in. We could 
have the gameport driver automatically pull in analog but that'd 
probably break people doing midi or using some more specialised input 
device. It's a hard problem that only impacts a pretty tiny set of 
people, so it's prioritised somewhere below the hard problems that 
impact a pretty large set of people.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org


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