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SubjectRe: Rewriting floppy.c was Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

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/
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