Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2017 22:03:52 +1100 (EST) From: Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au> To: Warner Losh <imp@freebsd.org> Cc: src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, svn-src-head@freebsd.org Subject: Re: svn commit: r326486 - in head/stand: ofw/libofw powerpc/boot1.chrp Message-ID: <20171203203741.S1153@besplex.bde.org> In-Reply-To: <201712030454.vB34ssem056112@repo.freebsd.org> References: <201712030454.vB34ssem056112@repo.freebsd.org>
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On Sat, 2 Dec 2017, Warner Losh wrote: > On Sat, Dec 2, 2017 at 7:18 PM, Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> wrote: > >> I'd like to remove floppy drive support from FreeBSD: No thanks. >> - The physical media is no longer produced Old media still exists. > There's still one company producing 3.5" floppies, though it's in super low > volume. And the media is still readily available. Supplier #2 near here still has 2 types of floppy drives in stock: 3.5 inch standard floppy drive and 3.5 inch USB floppy drive. You might be right about 5.25 inch media not being produced. On ebay the average price seems to be higher than new even for media that is guaranteed to have errors, so this media must be rare but needed. >> - Computers produced in the last 10-15 years don't have a floppy drive >> reader > > More like 8 years, but regardless of the actual year, that's also a weak > argument. No need to break the software to match. >> - There are still a few open bug reports relating to floppies(!) > > That would show it's still in use. More likely that the PRs are being handled properly by not closing old ones. >> - Its several thousand lines of code that could be removed > > Clang is much more than that. > >> Is there any reason to continue supporting floppy drives in FreeBSD 12.0+? > > That's a backwards question to project. > > However, to make your argument legit: > > Floppy support has been decaying for years. It hasn't worked well since > FreeBSD 6, and was completely broken sometime after FreeBSD 10 was > branched. We lost support for having two floppies on the same bus around > FreeBSD 7. And using fdcontrol to set the format became tricking between > FreeBSD 8 and 9. Floppies written today contain garbage due to ISA DMA > breakages post FreeBSD 10. They simply don't work at all in 11, and nobody > has stepped up to fix them. (I tried last summer, and gave up and got a > kyroflux.com board instead). Floppies used to be important, but not any I don't see many problems. -current i386 built last month worked perfectly for the following tests on hardware from 2003 with 1GB RAM (perhaps the DMA problem only affects amd64 with RAM above 4GB?): - compare 12 1440K floppies with their image backups - reformat one (using FreeBSD-~5 fdformat binary -- success show that the formatting ioctls are not broken) - write back original image to the reformatted one - verify last step under FreeBSD-5. > more. We've lost the only platform that required one to boot off floppies > (pc98) and the older x86 that required it doesn't run FreeBSD anymore > anyway. We never supported fdc on non x86 platforms, so those aren't a > consideration. > > We do have some floppy support in umass, but that should stay since USB > floppy drives are still a thing. > > Normally, I'd argue we might want to have a release where it's deprecated, > but it already was unusable in 11, and barely usable in 10 and has been a > shadow of its former self for much longer than that. I only noticed much breakage of special fd ioctls. The fd driver and utilities seem to be fully usable on some hardware in FreeBSD-current. Bruce
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