What is the significance of this?
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).
Floppies still work just fine on Windows 10, you know.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
It connects via a 100mbs 3com 3C905BTX nic. I call it the network attached device driver.
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.
Having worked in IT, this is entirely plausible. In fact I've had to do that entire runaround except with different technology.
"Merge floppy ioctl verification fixes from Denis Efremov."