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

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 04/12/2010 06:58 PM, Kyle McMartin wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:51:10AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> I occasionally use them for transferring data between some old laptops and
>> machines running Fedora. Occasionally I have also used them for driver disks,
>> though all of my computers currently are on the last bios version they are ever
>> likely to get.
>>
>> As things went in the other discussion, it isn't hard to get floppies to
>> work, it's hard finding out what the issue is and how to fix it. Now that
>> I know I need to run modprobe it isn't a big deal for me. But this information
>> is not readily available to people and can cause significant problems for
>> people who stumble accross it.
>
> The problem is, EVERYONE has a floppy controller and NOBODY(*) has a
> floppy disk drive.

Wrong, except for laptops until very recently every single standard machine sold
came with a floppy drive. In the university where I used to work all new machines
came with a ... floppy. That is all 2000 of them.

Where are your numbers, statements like EVERYONE and NOBODY really are quite
meaningless without some solid numbers to back them up.

> PNP only reports the presence of the controller, not
> the drive.
>

Wrong again, on most machines the presence of the PNP0700 id in the PNP data
depends on the setting of the floppy drive type in the BIOS, set it to None
and PNP0700 id goes away.

> Ergo: FAIL for everyone, for the sake of some ancient crap that nobody
> except for a vocal minority of approximately three people cares about.

Erm, you *completely* failed to respond to my upstream argument, if this is
as clear cut a decision as you make it, why don't you take it upstream ?

This whole discussion really is quite simply, there are 3 options here:

1) floppy driver autoloading on pnp info is a bad idea ->
    take it upstream

2) this is a gray area ->
    let not deviate from upstream, discuss upstream

3) floppy driver autoloading is fine, people with problems need
    to be educated to properly configure their BIOS

Also note that anaconda is autoloading the floppy driver on every install,
so if it would really be the cause of a lot of problems, we (the anaconda
team) would have been overwhelmed by bug reports about this by now, which
surprise, surprise we are not.

Regards,

Hans