Re: Rewriting floppy.c was Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>]

On Jan 31 2007 18:24, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 11:08:14AM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
>> Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> writes:
>> > 
>> > What?  Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
>> > that floppy.c is?  Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
>> > kernel development never to be seen again?
>> 
>> Doing a from-scratch rewrite of floppy.c only supporting new
>> hardware and no obscure formats ("newfloppy.c") would be an excellent 
>> newbie project imho.  This means for someone who is still pretty
>> new, but wants to get their fingers wet with more complicated changes.
>> 
>> Then over time (old-)floppy.c could be phased out.
>>...
>
>Considering how widespread floppies are, these two sentences are
>contradictions.
>
>If the goal is to phase out the old floppy driver, a new driver will 
>have to gain support for more or less all hardware the old driver 
>supports...

How much different hardware does the (old)floppy.c do? I imagine that
today, where floppies phase out, there will be, in descending order:

 * USB floppy drives (atm handled by sd.c, could be better to have sf.c)
 * FDCs on mainboards
 * 1.44M drives
 * 1.2M drives

Even a working 2.88M, as cool as it sounds, never landed in my hands ever
since I've been into computing. Perhaps the oldest, smallest disk I once
had was a 360K 5.25", but the B floppy drive to read it was already
multi-compliant that read up to 1.2M disks.


Jan
-- 
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/