Hi,
On 03/23/2010 04:40 PM, Brian C. Lane wrote:
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On 03/23/2010 03:03 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
Hi all,
Currently the loader is unconditionally loading the floppy driver,
this sometimes causes huge delays on systems which do not have a floppy
drive, see for example (there are other bugs too):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=574492
The proper thing to do here would be IMHO, to make the loading
of the floppy driver conditional on the BIOS declaring PNP id
PNP0700. Which is on which udev normally autoloads the floppy driver,
except that the Fedora kernels are patched to not autoload the floppy
driver at all.
Before investing time into coding this, I would like to receive
some feedback on this idea.
Here's how I look at it, asking myself a few questions:
What is Fedora's target? It is weighted towards leading edge, new stuff,
with some lesser amount of backwards compatibility. But the goal isn't
to be able to keep running on my old 500MHz firewall.
How many new systems have floppy drives? None, or close enough to none
that rounding down is allowed.
How many older systems is Fedora running on? I don't know, but the
number decreases with each release.
How many people are going to be made happier by a faster boot? Alot. And
the number will increase, not decrease.
How many people are going to be annoyed by having to explicitly load the
floppy driver? Not many -- especially if it is clearly documented as to
how to do it in 'all the right places(tm)'.
So I vote for making floppy driver loading an option that the user has
to pass a kernel argument for, and for clearly documenting the change
and what's needed to make it work the old way so that when the question
is inevitably asked there is a nice URL to point them to.
To be clear, I'm talking about the loading of the floppy driver by anaconda,
not during normal boot, so this is not about boot speed or some such.
Currently anaconda will always load the floppy disk driver (where as an
installed system will never load it automatically). This always loading
of the floppy driver is causing issues in certain installs. So my suggestion,
is to make the loading dependend on the presence of a BIOS PNP ID which
declares there is a floppy drive attached to the system.
This would effectively mean that *under the installer environment* the
standard upstream kernel behavior of auto loading the module when the
BIOS says there is a floppy drive iis restored (standard behavior
which gets patches out of the Fedora kernel by a Fedora specific patch).
Another perhaps better solution would be to remove the patch in question
from the Fedora kernel, but that is something to discuss on the kernel
list.
Regards,
Hans
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