L.S. up to vanilla kernel 4.4.13 floppy functionality performs like it should. (On an x86 PC that is. With a 1.44MB diskette drive.) >From kernel 4.5* and up it changed to barely usable.
After a virgin start (cold or warm boot) with an empty diskette drive and then loaded with a standard 720K diskette you may run 'mdir' (from mtools) and it shows the directory fine. The first time you load a standard 1.44MB diskette (wether it is a virgin start or after a 720K disktette) and you run mdir, it says literally: plain_io: Input/output error init A: could not read boot sector Cannot initialize 'A:' After this, all subsequent runs of mdir will do fine on both floppies. However, most of my floppies are in a different format. (1.6MB) I rely on 'setfdprm' (from fdutils) to set the correct parameters. setfdprm /dev/fd0 1600/1440 /dev/fd0: Invalid argument Strace shows me: ... open(/dev/fd0, O_ACCMODE) = -1 So this actually means that 'invalid argument' refers to O_ACCMODE. At all kernels I see no changed rights in: ls -al /dev/fd0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 2, 0 May 13 16:43 /dev/fd0 It looks to me that the code in floppy.c is quite old; no changes here. So the bug is elsewhere in the kernel. Could someone please explain and repair the magic that is happening here? Thanks in advance, Wim Osterholt. ----- w...@djo.tudelft.nl -----
