Re: RFC: make loader floppy driver loading conditional on PNP BIOS info ?

[Jon Masters <jcm redhat com>]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 10:33 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:53:34 -0400,
>   Jon Masters <jcm redhat com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 08:58 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > > 
> > > Of course now I know what to do, so it's not that big of a deal for me
> > > any more. But I think this is going to be confusing to at least some
> > > people in Fedora's target audience. So it would be nice if floppy drives
> > > worked by default on machines that have them.
> > 
> > FYI, this has been the case in Fedora for some time now. As far as
> > kernel behavior goes, that can be debated, but on the kernel list :)
> 
> This is ambiguous. Are you saying that because floppies have been broken by
> default for a release or two, it's OK to continue that?

No. I'm saying that Enterprise Linux stuff is separate from Fedora in
this regard, and the latter has been doing it for a while anyway.

> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=537741 has a couple of cc's on it
> and indicates at least a handful of people care.

Personally, I would prefer to load the floppy driver anyway. But Fedora
can decide to do whatever it wants. I can see some situations where
loading the driver can cause problems if the hardware isn't working.

> I am not so interested in kernel behavior as in having the floppy drive work
> by default for people. If this means adding something to the modprobe or
> udev directories for machines that actually have floppy drives, that would
> be a good solution.

There's several ways it could be done. But I suggest having the Fedora
kernel list debate it if you like - working around something in other
tools isn't the most generic solution, if you are seeking one.

Jon.