I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
11–20 of 201 posts
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#12> After 5 minutes I got freshly burned floppy.
oh god
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#13I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
No but I find this line interesting:
The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with full compatibility.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#14The persistence strategy described here (mount -t msdos -o rw /dev/fd0 /mnt) combined with a bind mount to home is a nice clever touch for saving space. I don't know if that's also true for data integrity on physical magnetic media. FAT12 is not a journaling filesystem. On a modern drive, a crash during a write is at best, annoying while on a 3.5" floppy with a 33mhz CPU, a write operation blocks for a perceptible am…
> If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.
Makes sense, great point. I would rather use a second drive for the write disk space, if possible (I know how rare it's now to have two floppy drives, but still).
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#15The persistence strategy described here (mount -t msdos -o rw /dev/fd0 /mnt) combined with a bind mount to home is a nice clever touch for saving space. I don't know if that's also true for data integrity on physical magnetic media. FAT12 is not a journaling filesystem. On a modern drive, a crash during a write is at best, annoying while on a 3.5" floppy with a 33mhz CPU, a write operation blocks for a perceptible am…
Controversial position: journaling is not as beneficial as commonly believed. I have been using FAT for decades and never encountered much in the way of data corruption. It's probably found in far more embedded devices than PCs these days.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#16I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
No but I find this line interesting: The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with full compatibility.
Any chance of backporting changes to be able to run on older hardware?
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#17I remember the QNX Demo on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. It booted straight into a full blown window manager and had a basic web browser. That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.
MenuetOS/KolibriOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075
That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.
Now you have ;-)
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#18I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
Don't think so? Linux should still support almost all builtin motherboard floppy controllers, for the platforms it still runs on. ISA floppy controller support is probably not as comprehensive, but not because anything has been dropped.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#19I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
Don't think so? Linux should still support almost all builtin motherboard floppy controllers, for the platforms it still runs on. ISA floppy controller support is probably not as comprehensive, but not because anything has been dropped.
Huh, yeah looks like I misremembered.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
No but I find this line interesting: The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with full compatibility.
Any chance of backporting changes to be able to run on older hardware?
https://kernel.org/ says 6.12 is still a supported LTS, so you could just run that.