Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:24:54 +0100 (MET) | From | Jan Engelhardt <> | Subject | Re: Rewriting floppy.c was Re: Free Linux Driver Development! |
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On Jan 31 2007 18:24, Adrian Bunk wrote: >On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 11:08:14AM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote: >> Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> writes: >> > >> > What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair >> > that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from >> > kernel development never to be seen again? >> >> Doing a from-scratch rewrite of floppy.c only supporting new >> hardware and no obscure formats ("newfloppy.c") would be an excellent >> newbie project imho. This means for someone who is still pretty >> new, but wants to get their fingers wet with more complicated changes. >> >> Then over time (old-)floppy.c could be phased out. >>... > >Considering how widespread floppies are, these two sentences are >contradictions. > >If the goal is to phase out the old floppy driver, a new driver will >have to gain support for more or less all hardware the old driver >supports...
How much different hardware does the (old)floppy.c do? I imagine that today, where floppies phase out, there will be, in descending order:
* USB floppy drives (atm handled by sd.c, could be better to have sf.c) * FDCs on mainboards * 1.44M drives * 1.2M drives
Even a working 2.88M, as cool as it sounds, never landed in my hands ever since I've been into computing. Perhaps the oldest, smallest disk I once had was a 360K 5.25", but the B floppy drive to read it was already multi-compliant that read up to 1.2M disks.
Jan -- ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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