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

[Tomas Mraz]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 13:41 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: 
> 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.

That seems like a clear opportunity to add a simple "configure legacy
hardware" button to anaconda, that would do the modprobe floppy/gameport
etc. stuff so it is loaded. Perhaps there could be switches: I have
these legacy hardware:
Floppy disk
Analog joystick
.... whatever