Deprecating / Removing floppy drive support

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Dec 2, 2017 at 7:18 PM, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to remove floppy drive support from FreeBSD:
>
> - The physical media is no longer produced
>

There's still one company producing 3.5" floppies, though it's in super low
volume. And the media is still readily available.


> - Computers produced in the last 10-15 years don't have a floppy drive
> reader
>

More like 8 years, but regardless of the actual year, that's also a weak
argument.


> - There are still a few open bug reports relating to floppies(!)
>

That would show it's still in use.


> - Its several thousand lines of code that could be removed
>

Clang is much more than that.


> Is there any reason to continue supporting floppy drives in FreeBSD 12.0+?


That's a backwards question to project.

However, to make your argument legit:

Floppy support has been decaying for years. It hasn't worked well since
FreeBSD 6, and was completely broken sometime after FreeBSD 10 was
branched. We lost support for having two floppies on the same bus around
FreeBSD 7. And using fdcontrol to set the format became tricking between
FreeBSD 8 and 9. Floppies written today contain garbage due to ISA DMA
breakages post FreeBSD 10. They simply don't work at all in 11, and nobody
has stepped up to fix them. (I tried last summer, and gave up and got a
kyroflux.com board instead). Floppies used to be important, but not any
more. We've lost the only platform that required one to boot off floppies
(pc98) and the older x86 that required it doesn't run FreeBSD anymore
anyway. We never supported fdc on non x86 platforms, so those aren't a
consideration.

We do have some floppy support in umass, but that should stay since USB
floppy drives are still a thing.

Normally, I'd argue we might want to have a release where it's deprecated,
but it already was unusable in 11, and barely usable in 10 and has been a
shadow of its former self for much longer than that.

Warner