Linus marks floppy driver as “orphaned” in Linux Kernel

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Because the technology is too old, Linus recently marked the floppy driver in Linux as “orphaned”. Linus merged the developer’s Denis Efremov on fixing the floppy ioctl verification problem and pointed out that the drive was marked as isolated. He said that it is difficult to find the physical floppy disk hardware in the actual work. Now basically no floppy disk is used, and the main sale seems to be based on USB devices that do not use the traditional driver of floppy. And although there are still some virtual machine environments that use the old floppy controllers, the problem is that no one is willing to maintain them.

“pink floppy modified”by Superman682 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Linus wrote:

“Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and
while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered
pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that
is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn’t use this
legacy driver at all.

The old floppy disk controller is still emulated in various VM
environments, so the driver isn’t going away, but let’s see if anybody
is interested to step up to maintain it.

The lack of hardware also likely means that the ioctl range verification
fixes are probably mostly relevant to anybody using floppies in a
virtual environment. Which is probably also going away in favor of USB
storage emulation, but who knows.”