Floppy RIP: controller is marked as an orphan in Linux

Floppy drive and floppy disk

There are still some computers that still use floppy drives to store in this type of primitive storage. Some of those computers are in places that you would never imagine or think have modern technology. For example, in the United States military they still depend on this floppy disk in some very specific cases. But the truth is that it is used less and less and in terms of business and home computing it is now non-existent.

This has been realized by the Linux kernel developers and especially the one in charge of continuing to maintain the floppy disk driver. In fact, given the little use it has, the controller has been marked as an orphan. That means your code will no longer be maintained or improved. Also, many of the floppy drives that are still sold today are USB-based, so they don't use the Legacy driver.

However, the old floppy drive will still be present in the Linux kernel. It will not go away, unless in the short term. And that is due to those teams that still continue to use it for one reason or another. Furthermore, it is still used in many virtual environments to emulate this functionality. So it is still necessary. It remains to be seen if over time it disappears and what happens to those machines that still depend on it ...

It reminds me a bit of the amount of money McLaren has invested to buy old Compaq LTE 5280 computers from the early 90's and with MS-DOS. The reason is that their McLaren F1 continues to depend on them, or more specifically on the CA card ...

Now Linus Torvalds has quoted in a GitHub comment that Will Deacon has reviewed the controller and noted some improvements to it, but have marked the source code file floppy.c as an orphan. So it runs out of support and we can say that it is destined to disappear over time. The new floppy drives based on the USB controller seem much more interesting than continuing to audit a piece of code destined for the old floppy disks.


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