“I would like to maintain the floppy driver” | Hacker News Reader

“I would like to maintain the floppy driver”

lore.kernel.org

361 pointsdoener225 comments

It's amazing how some parts of the kernel barely get maintained explicitly. A year or two ago I was digging through the block driver subsystem and at some point took a look at the loop device as a simple reference. I learned that it supports encryption, because that was actually the only way to implement encrypted volumes about 15 years ago. Dmcrypt didn't exist yet. I would be surprised if anyone still uses that feature, yet nobody bothered removing it. Loop is mostly ever touched if anything changes in the block layer. It was the first block device to be switched over to multi queue though, most likely due to its simplicity. Which is most likely also the reason nobody bothers becoming the official maintainer.

This is actually not unusual in nature. Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (collapse).

I like this, I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition. Are these new collapsed systems really less complex or just easier for our brains to think about? Natural(chaotic) systems certainly don’t seem to follow that logic unless I’m mistaken. Thinking of a river system, it seems that it is just in a state of flux, making little wins across the system all the time, but also becoming more complex due to inputs. If we consider a star system I have trouble identifying how the system doesn’t become permanently less complex as energy is radiated away over time. (Although I’m clueless on how to actually model either sort of complexity appropriately)

That said, it appears to me that as soon as we start to tread against entropy we might notice this phenomenon cropping up. Life seems to “collapse” on new designs and human understanding too seems to collapse, but in both cases it seems that only the system complexity collapses, not the entity complexity. I think that the collapse of the complexity of the surrounding system is the result of outside stimulus causing additional entity complexity to be added to the total complexity. In a stable, complex, system this has the potential for massive system destabilization, but it is not certain and it doesn’t seem to be the nature of complex system themselves to inherently collapse on less complex states, rather it is the result of stimulus. Moreover, if we look at total complexity, does it really become less complex or does the complexity just shift from the system to the entity?

"...wish it had a name..."

IIRC, I think first read the phrase "complexity catastrophe" in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. Per the authors, it's when a system becomes so complex (interdependent) that the cost of any further changes far outweigh the expected benefit.

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/...

>I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently

At least trend-wise, it’d probably look similiar to a malthusian catastrophe (population reaches environment carrying capacity at time n, and then (greatly) overshoots it at time n+1, resulting in mass die off due to starvation, taking the population well below carrying capacity)

> wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition.

In The Matrix movies that is sort of a key premise of their world setting. There are words like reset, reboot, reload for it.

But I don't think it's a given, not all complex systems are prone to collapse; some systems, once past a given point, may even perpetuate their complexity practically indefinitely.

Consider life on Earth: even if a cataclysm occurs that results in mass extinctions, new life will eventually take over, in millions if not "mere" thousands or hundreds of years.

Until Earth itself no longer exists that is. Same goes for galaxies and the Universe at large.

Hyrum's Law: "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody."

http://www.hyrumslaw.com/

https://xkcd.com/1172/

> Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (collapse).

I bet this is true of governments as well, since governments are systems.

The idea is actually from Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”.

See also Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (1988).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

I just spent two weeks removing an unused feature from my product. It's amazing how, despite being unused, it affected such a huge amount of the rest of the system (well, either that or my code is not separated properly).

I can understand how a truly complex system becomes "don't touch it except to add things, you have no idea what depends on that chunk of code"

I like leaving old code littered around, either commented out or disabled by feature flags. Then, when my energy/concentration levels are too low for real work, it's a strangely satisfying task going back and cleaning up and finally deleting that stuff.

I am going to give this a shot.

Thank you!

While this may be fine for you, it sucks for people reading the coding and searching it. Reading code is already a high concentration task, having to purposely ignore blocks of non-functional code makes it harder than it has to be. Also, now I can't just grep the codebase, I need to see the surrounding code as well to see if the search results are valid.

That is totally true when the code is behind a feature flag, rather than commented out. Most people can skip commented code just fine, since it looks like... commented out code, rather than comments intended to be read.

But even in the feature flag case, it serves a purpose by allowing old code to be removed in 2 stages rather than 1 (divide and conquer).

It means the old code still compiles, just in case it needs to be reinstated in a hurry.

I lead a crusade against commented out code and refuse to accept any PRs at work with commented out code. It makes most code search tools useless and adds tons of visual clutter (especially for our colleagues with ADD/ADHD)

Leaving commenter it code is like leaving full trash bags on your kitchen floor. Why are they there? Could the be necessary at some point? Is there a specific time we need to get rid of them?

I agree with you, commented out code is not ok, unless it is an example or pseudo code. The rest is trash and has no place in any reasonable codebase. If you want to see what the code was like six months ago, use git.

> Most people can skip commented code just fine, since it looks like... commented out code

Line comments, yes, but not for block comments or #if 0 disabled sections -- if your search result comes from the middle of one of those, it does not look like a comment without the context, and can mislead you.

Reading this makes me realize programming editors should have an optional search flag to skip comments. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

Like others have said, you may be surprised! Normally commented out code is at least highlighted differently in more editors. However, it is not unusual for people to complain to me that "if (blah)" is unreadable and must be formatted "if(blah)" (which honestly blows my mind -- you'd think it would be the other way around, if anything!)

One of the biggest thing that catches me out with commented out code is wondering why it is commented out. Is it desirable, but not working for some reason? Is it undesirable, but not deleted for some reason? Is the new code an experiment? Is the old code an experiment? If it's an experiment, am I sure the previous person reinstated the correct code?

Even if you say it can be reinstated in a hurry, why would it need to be? When I'm reading the code, that's one of the questions I'll be thinking about. If I see commented out code, I'll start walking back in history and seeing why the code was replaced. Then I'll be wondering if there is some work flow that perhaps we need to retain for some reason.

All of this takes time. If you really want the code to be gone, it's better for me if you remove it. Then I don't have to wonder why it is there.

> "don't touch it except to add things, you have no idea what depends on that chunk of code"

To me that's just a symptom of a system that lacks good test coverage. Being able to remove things that you believe to be unused and seeing if it's safe or not is one of the biggest benefits of test coverage. That and, of course, knowing if your "fix" doesn't break things far away that depend on it.

This is a minor plot point in the sci fi novel "A deepness in the sky", where a spacefaring culture has their systems built on top of so many, ancestral layers of software, that there is a career called "code archeologist" that dives deep into the bowels of systems to find undocumented functionality.

I totally can imagine how in the future there are these archeologists among all those JavaScript devs working for them trying to understand that weird language that Chrome was once written in, still in use decades after the company that built it went away.

Countless attempts to improve anything in that ancient code base failed since by that point, every little quirk that browser exposed was depended on by some essential system running a power plant, hospital or internet core infrastructure.

So the archeologists rather try to find even more quirks that can be abused for performance.

This is also a point in the Warhammer 40,000 Lore. some 18,000 years from now, Humanity advanced science and technology to nearly godlike extremes, and suffered a fully regressive collapse lasting close to another 10,000 years.

The fallout of this means that all 'modern' technology is operated upon by tech-priests, who blindly perform rituals upon equipment to ensure it's 'machine spirit' is satisfied. This ensures that the equipment will properly function. All knowledge as to how the most advanced equipment operates is lost - all that's left is how to produce some of the lesser pieces.

Caches of templates to produce standardised equipment are highly treasured. These ancient and supremely advanced caches produce extremely detailed designs for the entire supply chain required to build a single item. A template to provide for a slightly sharper knife is as desirable to the Imperium as another template to provide for a 55 Meters tall armoured war machine.

> Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler.

Deserves repeating.

At my job, it's repeatedly discussed as a feature to be an engineer who removes the most code. Most engineers are net positive, the few are break even... but the true greats are the ones who're able to go negative.

Pink diffs are the best diffs.

This is true. We hacked our internal web front end to show a big thumbs up next to commits that are net negative as a little motivator. It was mostly meant as a joke but sometimes it is satisfying to see that after a long refactoring session.

I tried getting the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu edition for work but couldn't enable full-disk encryption due to NVME not being supported at the time. The only thing to do was homedir encryption, which I believe are mounted as loop, at least in the standard Ubuntu config. So there are still circumstances today in which it's the only way to get encryption. (Incidentally, I gave up on that laptop because an ecryptfs mounted homedir broke inotify integration with a vagrant guest VM.)

ecryptfs doesn't use loop, rather it acts like a (windows term) file system filter, encrypting every file separately and storing it as a separate file in the underlying FS.

Ironically, at least as a design (I'm unfamiliar with the implementation), this is probably more secure.

Proper AEAD becomes a lot simpler, on the other hand a lot of structural information is just plain there.

That's a fair point; you'd do better than either design with a true encrypted filesystem.

assuming you don't care about metadata.

Probably not... any form of partial encryption (ie not the full block device) needs to make sure no sensitive data leaks outside the encrypted parts (/tmp and swap? /var if you only encrypt /home?)

Depending on the implementation the filesystem metadata may also reveal more data than needed. The attacker can probably ignore that 4GB file that wasn't modified for a year (a downloaded ISO image?) but that 20KB file that was recently modified might be that passwords.txt he was looking for..

It depends on what your biggest concern is. Large scale metadata analysis is a concern that block-level encryption does a better job of than "file filter encryption" does. Authenticated encryption, which prevents people from bitflipping your init scripts into bindshells if you lose access to your laptop for a few minutes, is something that file encryption addresses and block encryption basically doesn't.

The important thing is that you don't really have to choose; a true encrypted filesystem can give you both things. Block-level encryption can't.

I'm cleaning out my wife's 2008 Subaru in preparation to sell it.

In the door pockets, I have found a protractor, a 3.5" floppy disk, and a cassette tape.

All of these things were outdated when the car was new (well, except the protractor, but I still find it funny. She was well out of school when she got the car.)

The car came with a CD player.

I have no idea what's on the floppy.

I know we're not supposed to meme here, but the fact that you are essentially living an SNL send-up of a soppy Subaru commercial needs to be pointed out. Because it's hilarious.

Better if the floppy, protractor, and tape were part of a MacGyvered (MacGrubered?) solution to some jam out in the wilderness.

> I have no idea what's on the floppy.

Luckily for you, there now is someone who wants to maintain the floppy driver for the Linux kernel...

Pity the floppy would have been demagnitized by years in a hot car.

If it wasn't in direct sunlight or of it was a light color there's a good chance it's still readable.

Come on OP, don't let us down here.

I found an old Oldsmobile tape recently.

I couldn't play it (without hooking up my old tape player), but I did find it on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8P-RVqWnR4

Wait... A protractor isn't out of date :P

If you've replaced paper and pencil with a CAD tool...

Eh, I'm sure there's a phone app for that.

There is, actually; iphones have the measure app as of ios12 (though I’ve never successfully used it), which does angles

Interestingly enough, my 2019 Subaru came with a CD player. I doubt it will ever be used.

There are dash mounts for mobile phones that key into the CD slot. Works great on my Subaru. The latest ones have integral wireless charging and motorized grippers (!).

So finally the CD tray is the cup holder we always knew it to be...

My in-laws gave us an audiobook CD maybe 6-8mo after I bought my 2016 VW, and I honestly had to think about whether it had a CD player or not. I had a vague recollection that there was something in the glovebox, was hoping it was a CD player for the audio system and not for nav -- and I was right!

Our Tesla 3 definitely does not have a CD/tape player, although you can plug in USB sticks with music.

I love the fact that the device most people think of as a "floppy" disk isn't even floppy -- by the time removable-spinning-media-in-a-sleeve became truly mainstream the drive itself had gone back to being rigid.

So the word "floppy" was itself vestigial.

The sleeves are rigid; but the disk (of ferrite-dusted plastic) is still floppy.

You kids! It’s called a floppy drive. Back in the day, not even the drives were rigid.

When working on the bleeding edge, it's necessary to be flexible, no matter the era.

This is the best comment here

Always amazes me that people find it necessary to downvote a comment like this

For what it's worth, I upvoted you. The points are free. Why be stingy?

If you prefer a low effort / high noise comment environment that rewards puns, there's always Reddit

HN is not immune to this phenomenon. It just has its own versions.

the 5 1/4" ones were all floppy!

As were the 8" hard sectored diskettes. Don't forget the write-protect notch.

> Don't forget the write-protect notch.

And don't forget you can notch each side for double the storage!

May not be a great idea: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15189#p204...

```just a word of warning, copy everything off them [commercially-available flippable 5.25" BBC Micro disks] quick, as the 'side2' goes backwards to the cotton cloth cleaner inside the 5 1/4" case, so basically all the crap caught in it then end up coming out when playing other flip side :('''

(No idea how common this phenomenon might have been! - I've always had double-sided drives, so I've always used the other side of the disk in the normal fashion.)

The 1st thing you do on apple II diskettes (5.25") was using a scissors to allow the other side to be writable as well. No exceptions (alternatively you just break the plastic switch that tells if there is copy-write protection, on the floppy driver, itself)

I have taken the floppy out of the sleeves to dry them out as the entirety of my collection fell in the aquarium.

Write protect == hole punch

Writable == tape

Find me someone who used 5.25 who didn’t do this and I’ll fight you.

I punched holes in the corners of my 5.25" disks and kept them in a ring binder.

Then there were things like fdformat ... because software had a very close relationship with the hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

Ah, an obscure catch! Most of the 8" floppies were soft-sectored though I believe the original ones were hard sectored. I only once ever used a hard-sector drive + media.

Yeah I actually had a couple machines that used them. One was an Altos something like this http://www.vintage-computer.com/altos8000acs.shtml and the other was some single cabinet scientific job. I forget if the hard-sectored disks would work in a soft-sectored drive or not; perhaps it would just ignore the holes.

My first boss out of college had a side job maintaining check encoding machines for a local bank (imagine a room full of these machines, staffed by people who were glad not to be working in a warehouse anymore, who spent their hours typing in the dollar amounts people had scribbled on the paper checks they had written to the supermarket, carwash, dry cleaners, etc.)

These machines ran off a program that was stored on 8" floppies. All the workers had been told to NEVER EVER touch the floppies. Well one night, a disk went bad and had to be replaced. To the horror of the operator, my boss ripped the magnetic media out through the spindle hole, looked at it closely, and proclaimed "Yep. It's bad"

The disc inside is, but I'm not sure the disk as a whole is soft enough to qualify? The casing is definitely not as solid as the 3.5" or 3" ones, but it doesn't exactly flop even if held by a corner. Even folding one in half isn't especially easy.

they were totally soft, you could make a cylinder out of them and after releasing them - they got back in the original state.

"Soft", that's arguable, though I might allow it. But "floppy"? I claim not!

If you hold a 5.25" diskette at the edge, then shake/jerk your hand up and down, it resembles doggy floppy ears.

3” discs could take an eye out.

Is that the right term, "sleeve"? I always thought of the "sleeve" on my 5.25" floppies as being the tyvek/paper thingie you stuck the floppy disk inside for safekeeping (ultimately putting both in a case/cabinet - which I still have several).

Maybe the thing I thought of as a "sleeve" (analogous to a album "sleeve") is actually called something else (maybe an "envelope"?) - I never really gave it thought until now, honestly.

The white stuff is the liner.

I picked up a 5 1/4" floppy without the sleeve that was on the side of the road 20 years ago, sliced open another disc sleeve that had bad sectors and replaced it with the found disc. I still had a working XT at the time.

It had The Black Cauldron, PC Jr bootable version on it.

Nice. One time, I brought home a 3.5" disk from elementary school with a copy of Commander Keen 5 on it - the paid one that was so hard to get for a kid with no money and no modem. I somehow managed to leave it on the driveway near the car, overnight, inside of a faux leather wallets of sorts.

It snowed. It was the winter break, so there was no going back to school to see the other kid who had made the copy for me, not for 2 weeks. This was supposed to be my fun game for the break....

So, I carefully opened the disk, set it to dry over the heating vent, put it back together, and with the help of Norton Utilities 5.0's Disk Doctor, I got a mostly playable copy out of it. Absolutely amazing.

Inside a 3.5" floppy hard-shell is a floppy disk that's made of the same (or very similar) floppy material that a 5.25" and 8" floppy is made of. So I think the term is OK.

If I remember correctly, you used to be able to actually take the magnetic material out of the sleeve and it would run in the drive.

Not on the standard 3.5" but I believe I've seen some (very old very obscure) solutions like that.

I did one day put a 5 1/4 floppy in the small gap between 2 drive bays. Plonk! Oh well, time to get the screwdriver. I heard it happened a lot at the time.

Also on the Mac II, when the blank hiding the second floppy slot used to fall down. I remember a secretary calling in distress after having inserted 20 floppies or so inside the Mac to no effect: they were all piling up inside, behind the floppy 2 slot :)

Thats ok, anyone who has been a bench tech, field tech, especially in the later 90s to early 2000s, has a similar story to this. Ive had people manage to force CDs between two drive bays and wonder why their CD wasnt being detected. Have had people insert credit cards in floppy drives, etc..

[Edit] there used to be a website, similar to bash.org, that people would submit stories like this all the time of stupid shit they were running into as a tech. Dont recall what it was. There was also and admin site, they may have been the same.

One of the older ones was the daily wtf, still around but not nearly as good as it used to be. There's a subreddit /r/talesfromtechsupport that has become my go-to for that now.

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ ?

You just reminded me of a curiosity that were the DVD-RAM discs - they came in plastic cases with a sliding window(exactly like a floppy) and there were special drives that accepted them in the case. However you could remove it from the case and most regular DVD drives would read and write them without any issues.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM

The early Apple CDROM drives also took a caddy that you put your disk into.

The proposed Nintendo/Sony CD-ROM was also caddy based.

I just remembered that UMD discs for the PSP came in a plastic case(which stupidly didn't include a sliding window, leading to the discs getting scratched even though they were in the case).

My first 1x burner used a cartridge and slot.

Some good coverage on DVD-RAM & caddys from technology connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls [DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxt5A0KJ9nw [Early CD-ROM Drives: Why Did They Require a Caddy?]

You can technically still do this with 3.5" disks, it's just a invitation for horrible mechanical problems when (not if) the disk touches something it shouldn't or unseats from the drive motor. Also you need to manually push various latches and levers that the sleeve would have run into.

The first floppies we've had were the 5.25 inch kind which were truly floppy. I remember how strange it felt to hold the new ones which were in a hard case.

I think the 8 inch floppy predates the 5.25 one.

The first time i saw an 8-inch disk, i thought it was some sort of wind-up. But no, there really were disks that big once; my dad had one from some ancient minicomputer he'd worked on at some point.

The TRS-80 Model II used them. Some CP/M microcomputers did too.

I had an old Model II 8" drive I had pulled out of old machine that I used in the Intro to Computing class I taught in the 90's. It made a great prop to show how drives work. The read/write head was about the size of a matchbox.

Early in my career and after a field trip abroad commissioning an aircraft simulator I was stopped at customs with a box of them and was asked what they were worth. Said that we could send the data by modem and so effectively nothing. I was allowed to pass.

Father worked at DEC; picked up a PDT-11/150 on discount as a home system. Intended by DEC as an industrial controller.

Low-level LSI-11 processor variant, 128k RAM, (2) 8" floppy drives. The case was 75% floppy drive, 25 % processor boards on top.

Came with RT-11 build floppies, I had to run the OS build in order to generate a boot disk and three language/utility disks. Took about 8 hours to do the full optioning and build from the 13 source floppies.

Ahh, the old days. Wrote my first D&D game, ballistic path analysis, mandelbrot drawn to 80x24 greenscreen VT01...

I have a stack of 8" floppies sitting on my desk. Also have the old Wang computer they go to laying around. I have not been able to find the actual disk drive though.

Yep, you could punch holes in them and put them into binders. Their size was just right for this. Supposedly, it was a perfect way to keep them organized.

Back in the late 80s we had a PL/M development system from Intel we used to program 8051 and 8096 microcontrollers for industrial sensors at Honeywell. The code was saved on 8" floppies.

A photo of that bad boy http://home.kpn.nl/a.dikker1/museum/blauwebak.html

And in use until recently! https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/25/us-military-uses-8-inch-flop...

Wikipedia agrees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk):

8-inch: 1972

5.25-inch: 1976

3.5-inch: 1982

The IBM 23FD (read-only) was released for the System 370 in 1971. The first read-write floppy drive, Memorex 650, was available in 1972.

https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1968/

Indeed - the smell of a new flappy diskette - yay more storage.

Yeah, the 3.5" disks are actually 'stiffies', not 'floppies'.

Yes, that’s what they were known as in South Africa.

Comparatively speaking (to a hard drive) a 3.5" disc is still pretty "floppy."

I remember being confused because all my 3.5” disks were High Density so they had a “HD” stamped on them. I was pretty sure they were hard disks and the old 5.25” were floppy.

I get that this is an ironic take on the semantic reference and the object it represented but I think there is merit in talking about why the obviously-not-floppy 3.5 disk was called "floppy."

At the time, "hard disk" referred to the spinning disk inside the computer & so though "floppy" wasn't technically accurate when referring to the 3.5 inch floppy, it was a nomenclature referring its utility or type rather than a physical description actual object itself.

"Floppies" were the things that you stuck in and removed... didn't matter their covering material, nor what size they were.

It's interesting to think about how many of our words have the same kind of history; once having a widespread descriptive meaning associated with physical traits of the object itself which ultimately were divorced from the original meaning over time...

I'm going to hazard a guess that most of our nouns have that kind of history... but the interesting thing here is that this morphing happened so quickly and it's because the object itself changed, not some generational loss of original meaning...

This kind of thing fascinates me. Another example is the various names we have for types of cars- coupes, sedans, even more obscure ones like 'shooting brake'. These were names for types of horse-drawn carriages, and cars inherited the names as models were released which mimicked some aspects of one type of carriage or another.

Another example is when someone refers to recording something as "taping" it, even though tape as a recording medium is mostly long gone. In their conversations, the term "taping" made the leap from "recording on tape" to simply "recording", and lost its original meaning.

I don't agree. The plastic spinning discs inside a 3.5 were still floppy and discs. We didn't call Bernoulli boxes or Zip drives floppies. Your clue is the word disc. The 3.5 inch disc was inside a rigid case but still a disc and yes floppy.

That's cool, I think it'd be shame for it to remain unmaintained given that there must be a lot of legacy software on floppy disks. (I understand there are tools that provide a USB interface though)

I recently bought a PC104 board, specifically so that I can use the floppy disk interface, for 5.25 and 3.5 floppy disk drives.

Most of my floppy disks are badly corrupted; IIRC data on them is considered to have a lifetime of about 10 years. That being said, my 360k and 720k 3.5" floppies seem to work considerably better than my 1.44MB 3.5" floppies even though they are quite a bit older. Not sure if it's because of cheapening of production or just the higher density of data.

Darn that's a shame. I wonder if you could retrieve some of the data using hardware like kryoflux.

I actually just replied to the person suggesting kryoflux... I was able to recover most of my seeming corrupted disks using kryoflux and a bunch of different floppy drives... different drives were able to read different sectors, which lead me to be able to recover the entire image.

That's really cool to hear :)

Also interesting that you used different drives to achieve that too, I wonder why different drives could read different sectors. Possibly the pickup coil of the read head was slightly different size maybe? Or the stepper motor aligns the head to slightly different positions of the track?

Not exactly sure. Those were some of my theories, too.

Were they able to read those sectors correctly? (Can you tell?)

Yes. Kryoflux is pretty good at not saying a sector is good unless it actually is. I was able to mount almost all of the images I made this way, and haven't seen data corruption issues.

All of my floppies are either very old commercial software (that I could likely download from an abandonware site) or personal data that I backed up a long time ago.

Most of my 1.44MB 3.5" have rotted away as well. Sadly I don't have older ones left to test. I also havent seen a 5.25" drive in a long long time.

What you should really do with floppies is to quickly copy the data to another storage medium.

For whatever reason my copy of "Star Trek: The Rebel Universe" (dated 1988) which is a lower density 3.5" disk works just fine still. It's old enough to be elected as a US senator now.

I got myself a kryoflux about a year ago, because I also had a bunch of corrupted disks. I was actually able to recover almost all of them..... what I found was that different drives would have different failed sectors, so I bought like 5-6 different floppy drives, and would scan the same disk with all of them. I could then patch together the working sectors from each drive to get a full image.

Kryoflux is pretty amazing

https://www.kryoflux.com/

I'm afraid to look at the state of my Amiga 3.5s, not to mention the older 5.25s. Sadly, they are probably lost to time.

Same experience here: my late-90s PC HD floppies are almost all unreadable. The early-90s DD floppies from my Amiga are almost all still readable without errors.

So your PC104 board working with the latest Linux kernel and had a floppy disk interface? Which processor does it have?

I haven't installed Linux on it yet, however the processor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaGX seems to use the 486 instruction set, so I believe it should still work with modern kernels.

Shouldn’t the floppy driver be incredibly stable code after all these years? It’s surely in maintenance mode rather than feature development, and surely all the bugs have been ironed out by now!

> surely all the bugs have been ironed out by now!

Famous last words.

Maintaining that kind of code is often less about dealing with lingering bugs, than it is about making sure that it's kept in sync with changes to the rest of the kernel that might be relevant. If some kernel structure that the FDD driver uses changes, it needs to know that.

EDIT: Phrasing

> about making sure that it's kept in sync with changes to the rest

At one of my workplaces we had an application that was without a formal supporter and everyone hated to touch it. After I was assigned to dive in to fix a bug, I did a study of how it got that way. I was very surprised by the results I found. Basically, two things went wrong:

* Firstly, due to some mismanagement, the local team moved away, leaving it unsupported.

* Secondly, outside code underwent some paradigm shifts, meaning that anyone who knew outside code found this code to be foreign. Often, people assigned to fix bugs/add features in this code would try to apply the outside paradigms without understanding or adapting the local conventions, creating ugly code interfaces.

Here was the part that amazed me: The time between this code being not-perfect-but-perfectly-normal and becoming ugh-I-hope-I-don't-have-to-touch-that was _6 months_(!)

We've always known that technical debt becomes a problem, but I had no idea it would compound so quickly. Granted, this was at a "post-startup" company going through rapid change as the scope of work kept increasing, but that's still a startlingly fast decay rate for code that was decently written and tested.

Definitely proved to me the value of an active maintainer.

Yeah, that kind of "process" probably invites code rot. It's subtle, insidious, and yes, sometimes, shockingly quick to set in.

As a witter person that I put it, "code ages like milk, not like wine".

It's remarkable how closely this fits with a system at my company. Without close attention, things can spiral out of control faster than you can imagine.

That's what happens when you choose not to have a stable API for drivers. Maybe Linux developers should reconsider that ;-)

Yeah, but you never know when something somewhere else in the kernel might break it. And not many people have the hardware (not to mention patience) to run a bunch of regression tests for new releases.

> Shouldn’t the floppy driver be incredibly stable code after all these years?

Not if it calls or is called by code that changes more frequently.

Say you modify the HAL interface, then you need to edit this to work as well.

'I'm afraid the floppy kernel can't do that, Dave.'

A very recent commit fixed some out-of-bounds and a divide-by-zero error: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/47d6a7607443ea43dbc...

Software ages by association. Whatever system it's on or associated with dictates its life span.

Like if you put a soda on a block of ice outside. It will last through the winter and stay solid. Wait until spring and things start getting slippery and wet. The ice and soda are showing signs of aging. Summer hits, and your soda crashes to the ground, spills, everything is just sticky, unusable, and bugs are everywhere.

This is an excellent analogy and I can't understand why it's being downvoted. Software is only as useful as its surroundings find it useful.

That's something to put on your resume and mention in an interview.

And then the response:

"You maintain a what driver?"

places floppy drive on desk "This. It runs this."

you maintain the save button ? thats awesome.

For real though, my friend is a professor, and one of her students asked her during office hours why she had 3d printed a bunch of the save icons and kept them on her desk.

That actually happened? It's not just an internet legend?

I heard it straight from her, lol.

I could easily seeing that happen. Watching my kid grow up, it's actually pretty interesting to see how frequently stuff like this occurs.

- To those who were around when the icon was created, the floppy disk is associated with storing a version of a file. So the action that occurs when pressing the icon can be intuited via transference. To those who have no knowledge of a floppy disk (like younger people), it's purely idiomatic and that the icon represents saving the current state of a file is an idiomatic definition that needs to be committed to memory by rote.

- "Hanging up the phone" (and it's associated icon of a horizontally-placed or forward-tilted handset) is also decoupled from the current reality of disconnecting a phone call. When she finally made her confusion known, we had to explain to her that it meant to end the call (i.e. press the red button on the screen). Before that, she was really confused and thought we were trying to tell her to do something weird with the charging cable (what else would she "hang" it from?).

- # is an incredibly common symbol nowadays. It's referred to as a hashtag. Not a pound symbol, number symbol, or even a hash symbol. But "hashtag selfie" is said in speech to represent the hashtag "#selfie". "Press pound" or "Press the pound key" is not an intuitive instruction to a huge swath of younger people or non-native speakers that picked up a lot of their vocabulary from modern movies/tv/Youtube.

- Alarm clock, stopwatch, and timer icons also tend to be the subject of rote memorization rather than transference learning, at least earlier in life. Representative objects are around (either sold as a retro analog device, TV/movies, grandparents, etc), but not nearly ubiquitous enough to have exposure to the device before the icon.

The list goes on. It's far more common than you'd think for iconographic elements and instructions to be entirely intuitive to those that understand the origins of the icons, while being purely idiomatic and non-intuitive to others.

For someone who has only ever been exposed to a floppy disk in the form of a save icon, assuming it's a 3D printed icon or novelty toy/paperweight/thing is a pretty logical conclusion. Even more so as older movies get phased out of common circulation, so they don't even get indirect exposure that way.

Can confirm, have heard # in programming referred to as hashtag by young students.

In 2009, I was at university, majoring in physics. The curriculum for experimental physics contained a series of lab courses. One of these used an old-but-reliable specialized measuring device for which only a DOS driver was available. (The DOS box next to it probably came with the device.) It was still working flawlessly, but of course, DOS can only write to floppy disks.

This wasn't a problem before because the result data could just be copied to a USB drive using one of the several workstations in the experimental physics department. However, when I did the lab course, the dept had been outfitted with all-new workstations just a few days prior. And of course the new workstations did not have floppy disk drives anymore. It took the instructor a while to locate a PC that still had one.

I wonder if that DOS box is still in use.

>but of course, DOS can only write to floppy disks

DOS can write to hard drives just fine. Maybe not some early versions, but certainly all of the versions I used.

Well yeah, but I was talking about getting data off the system onto my own notebook (for the purpose of writing the lab course report). A 90s-era hard drive would be even more impractical for this purpose than a floppy disk.

I think her student was messing with her, even young kids know what floppies are thanks to the "3d printed save button" meme :-P

I mean, think about it: many people who were born in the 80s and 90s know about phonographs despite them being long obsolete by that point, thanks to the references in cartoons, movies and other forms of media they consumed as children.

I mean, you can still go to a record store, and due to the analog nature of the stored audio, and the fact that you have to rebuy albums to format shift for the vast majority of people, meant that vinyl records far outlived the time they were technically required. I listened to a vinyl album last week; when was the last time you saw, much less used, a floppy disk? Do you think it's crazy out there that large swathes gen z legitimately has never seen one?

With phonograph i mean this [0], not any (modern) record player. It might be a language/region thing, but at least i understand "phonograph" (and "gramophone") to be the antique mechanical record players with the large metal horn.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/VictorVP...

I mean, that wiki page shows that electronic record players can still be referred to as a phonograph.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Philco_T...

Bonus points if it's a 5 1/4" or 8" disk.

Did Linux ever support 8" disks?

IIRC 8" drives held only 1kb (yes, only 1024 bytes!) so I doubt they'd be of much use, even in the earliest days of Linux.

Apparently, the original 8" floppy, IBM's nicely named "Diskette 1", held around 240 KB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#8-inch_floppy_disk

> it was IBM's 1973 introduction of the 3740 data entry system[24] that began the establishment of floppy disks, called by IBM the "Diskette 1", as an industry standard for information interchange. The formatted diskette for this system stored 242,944 bytes

I remember 1 megabyte floppies on some CP/M boxes. They seemed surreally large back then.

Back in the day I used to call those "actual floppy disks" so people knew what I was talking about ... also for me.

AfD = Actual floppy Disks. I like that.

I recently found a really old floppy in a box.

It contained the first client work I ever did for someone, around 1990 or so.

It was an implementation of an algorithm for computing the inbreeding coefficient of a population.

The program read the population data from a database and then wrote the resulting coefficient back into a new column.

I pleasantly surprised at how good my code was.

Out of curiosity, what language was it written in?

It was written in K&R style C (pre ANSI).

"Well, without jokes about Thunderdome..."

Anyone care to explain?

One of the plot elements of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome was a group of orphans, is my guess.

EDIT: Nope, or only indirectly. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595137

Possibly a reference to the Mad Max movie...

Jiri Kosina wrote when he became the floppy maintainer in 2012: "I have fought the current maintainer to the death in the Thunderdome" https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/8206f664bfd7121e79f...

Denis Efremov sent the security patches to floppy driver. Jiri orphaned the driver: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/47d6a7607443ea43dbc...

And now Denis wants to maintain the floppy driver...

Linus https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/16/370: "You'll have to fight the current maintainer to the death in the Thunderdome. What's that, you say?"

I've got a PC that's fairly modern but still has a floppy controller on board. It's sitting in an IBM Workstation case with an OG IBM 360K 5.25" drive and a 3.5" drive. I plan to hook those up and make them work but I need to buy some floppy cables off eBay.

Same here. On motherboards without a floppy port I mod a Rosewill RCR-FD400 media reader [1] replacing the stock 3.5" floppy with a slim YD-8U10-2 USB model [2]. Handy having it and all the card readers in one 3.5" bay.

[1] https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rcr-fd400-74-in-1/p/N82E1682...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100130173743/http://www.geeks....

If you can find one, a LS-120 is a nifty alternative. Works with a $5 PATA-SATA adaptor.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Sometimes you have to cut the cruft to focus the energy on what’s critical.

If you have an old floppy that you want to read you could also just install an old version of Linux.

A maintainer came forward and volunteered. That doesn't take focus away from other people who will be uninvolved.

Although I could see a security argument. Wasn't there a qemu bug that involved exploiting a virtual floppy drive?

Yep, although I'm not sure if the virtual floppy disk is the same thing as is being discussed here.

It even had a catchy name "VENOM", https://venom.crowdstrike.com/

It is not the same thing, no, but it highlights that having privileged code that is not frequently exercised or thought to be running can lead to bad times. Most users who were vulnerable to that one were likely not frequently thinking of the floppy device.

It's a floppy driver. I don't think much is going to change, besides making sure it still works

In the Y2K era I made a Linux firewall that fit on a single floppy disk: kernel, vi, and a tiny partition config mounted as a loopback device. 1.44MB and it ran great!

Linux owes its existence to the floppy, for years that was the only way to bootstrap it. Good to see support going forward.

I still remember my first Linux was Slackware on a stack of 3.5" discs downloaded from a BBS.

It was a pretty epic stack, too, like at least twenty disks to do a basic install, each one an adventure to download and image.

What is the significance of this?

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/47d6a7607443ea43dbc...

Looking at this again, I just realized that the person who mailed the patch that triggered the orphaning of the driver is also the person who is now volunteering to maintain the floppy driver.

Denis Efremov is the new maintainer, Jiri Kosina is the old maintainer.

Indeed, and the first line of the merge description:

"Merge floppy ioctl verification fixes from Denis Efremov."

The floppy disk drivers were no longer being maintained. They were orphaning the drivers and they would eventually rot as the rest of the kernel changed around it. Then someone else stepped up to take the position of maintaining the driver.

It's significant because a) some dude out there still has working floppy disk drives and feels that they might still be used, and b) this basically proves that Linux has the best legacy device support.

If they didn't maintain this you would be stuck keeping an old computer alive that had a floppy drive and a CD burner, to burn any data you needed to a CD, then another old computer that has a CD drive and a USB port to move the data off a CD (/s, but only kinda).

> you would be stuck keeping an old computer alive that had a floppy drive and a CD burner, to burn any data you needed to a CD, then another old computer that has a CD drive and a USB port to move the data off a CD (/s, but only kinda).

Having worked in IT, this is entirely plausible. In fact I've had to do that entire runaround except with different technology.

I had to use exactly this workflow a while back. SCSI based CD burner too, which I still have... just in case.

Thank you for you service, floppy driver guy, wherever you are.

No need. There is still USB floppy support which is not affected by the removal of the floppy driver.

> If they didn't maintain this you would be stuck keeping an old computer alive that had a floppy drive and a CD burner, to burn any data you needed to a CD, then another old computer that has a CD drive and a USB port to move the data off a CD (/s, but only kinda).

If I understand it right, the USB floppy drive drivers were still maintained; it's just the old ISA (now LPC) floppy controllers that were orphaned.

actually doesn't vmware use the "old" isa emulation to add floppy drives as config drives?

I still have a redhat 9 machine with a 333Mhz pentium3 cpu, 5 1/4 floppy, 3 1/2 floppy, Yamaha scsi CD burner an adpatec 2940, and a Promise Ultra100 TX2 PCI IDE Controller for strage old IDE disks. It also has a soundblaster with the wavetable addition for that old-time midi goodness.

It connects via a 100mbs 3com 3C905BTX nic. I call it the network attached device driver.

Just 2 and a half years ago I was running the kernel 4.10 on such equipment - AMD K6-2 300MHz, 3DFx Banshee (AGP2x), Trident 9440 (PCI), television card bt878, sound card Maestro, SoundBlaster Creative. Everything worked. I am sure that it would also move under the latest 5.3-rc2. A bigger problem is with the right (ready) userland (i486, i586) than using old hardware with the latest kernel.

We've a system at my employer that has a 5" floppy, IDE CDRW drive (yes they exist) with USB 1 so that we can pull off some really ancient software every couple years.

> this basically proves that Linux has the best legacy device support

Floppies still work just fine on Windows 10, you know.

They absolutely do! I write floppies fairly often for some 90s era music sequencers and drum machines.

Music equipment is why I still have floppy drives, as well.

My Yamaha PSR-700 series workstation keyboard uses floppies as its primary memory, and still works fine.

Its replacement, Yamaha PSR-SX700, is coming out in October 2019 at MSRP of $1,999, and is not fundamentally different. (And if I use the 90s version to control Korg Monlogue / Deepmind / etc to get the sounds, then the marginal value of the new instrument goes way down).

So floppies it is.

There are floppy emulators that look electrically like a floppy but take USB or SD memory. Eventually I'll swap in one of these.

And PC's would still have floppy disk drives and RS232 ports if it wasn't for Steve Jobs :)

Well, Firewire probably would have won if it weren't for Steve Jobs too.

You say it as if having them were a bad thing.

The fact is, people who want floppy drives in their PCs can still install them. And RS232 is alive and well on Raspberry Pi.

On the other hand, the mobile world is suffering a lot from the "removing ports is a good thing" stupidity. That's how you get cell phones without a headphone jack, and laptops without a (micro)SD card slot and no USB-A ports (even when the space clearly permits them).

The ports that aren't used disappear gradually without the need to be "brave" (e.g. DVD bays from laptops).

*Serial is still alive and well on raspberry pi and other embedded devices; rs232 is a more specific protocol which defines voltage levels (higher than the 3V of the RPI), flow control, line length etc.

> some dude out there still has working floppy disk drives and feels that they might still be used

I don't know if I would ever use mine (maybe with MESS emulation for my TRS-80 Color Computer?) - but I have a small collection of 3.5" and 5.25" working floppy drives (plus cleaning disks, alignment disks, and an analog Tek oscilloscope) that I keep around "just in case" - mainly for emulation purposes, or for some odd time I might need one. For both, I also have collected at least one of each of low-density, double-density, and high-density drives - because again, different systems. The only kind of drives I don't have that were common back then were the 5.25" ones on the Apple IIe - because they were crap back then that'd break if you so much as looked at them. I doubt few have survived in working order today (seriously, they were that bad - you take one of those drives and compare it with a TEAC or similar from the era - night and day).

I have an Apple IIe with a couple extra drives and a large collection of software on ancient disks. It was working last time I fired it up about 10-15 years ago, but I fear disappointment so I haven't messed with it lately. It all just sits in a sealed bin in the downstairs hall closet.

I tell myself I keep old hardware around in case general purpose computing dies or descends too far into user-hostile dystopia, but I'm probably just a hoarder.

Though it's been years since I used one, I'd still put floppy drive support in the "obvious" category. I suppose it's noteworthy that it no longer had a maintainer.

My pentium with a floppy disk drive has ethernet, so i just copy the files over the network. It's kinda slow, but not as slow as burning a CD (who am I kidding? The box has a CDROM drive, but it's read only). I use this setup to get the photos off my Sony Mavica.

On a new MacBook Pro I can plug a USB floppy drive and works. I have one.

I was cleaning out my basement last week and found some 5" floppy disks. It hadn't occurred to me that Linux would drop support.

Floppy drives get first class support on Windows 10 though.

(...the couple of 3.5" discs that I now use in old music equipment originally came from a supply room in Microsoft when I interned there in 2014, although I'm not sure what they were used for even back then).

Linux hadn't dropped support, the driver is stable and still present. Without an official maintainer it would continue to work for some time, though would eventually need fixing as other parts of the kernel change around it.

Even without an official maintainer interested people could still update it if changes to other parts of the kernel broke something.

I have an Archimedes floppy disk that is probably corrupted to hell that has my last saved point on Elite.

Ive got a few floppy drives that I would be glad to donate if shipping was covered.

All jokes aside, this is great for software preservation folks.

If we don't maintain this driver, our grandkids will never understand certain bash.org quotes concerning a floppy disk and a hard drive.

This is the perfect Friday evening thread!

Who tests the work of the developer?

The users! It is provided for free, anyone is free to pony up the funds/effort to develop and run tests. If you find a bug but don’t know how to fix it, there’s even a guy (the developer) who will try to fix it for you free of charge!

A clear candidate for systemd

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