On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 13:41 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 06:50:11AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 03:33:04 +0200,
> Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler(a)chello.at> wrote:
> >
> > No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe it
> > manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe it
> > for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about it
> > were ignored or declared NOTABUG.
>
> There was significant discussion about this issue on the mailing lists
> and Kyle thought he had a good solution to having the floppy drive
> recognized when it was there and not adding long delays to the boot up
> for people with incorrectly configured (your supposed to disable the floppy
> drive in the bios when you don't have one) or broken bios. I am not sure
> what happened with the implementation of the solution.
ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines
will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives
attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of
drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely
havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded,
which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.
That seems like a clear opportunity to add a simple "configure legacy
hardware" button to anaconda, that would do the modprobe floppy/gameport
etc. stuff so it is loaded. Perhaps there could be switches: I have
these legacy hardware:
Floppy disk
Analog joystick
.... whatever