[parisc-linux] Floppy disk support for 9000 series (715, 755, etc.) workstations.

[Grant Grundler]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 03:51:32PM -0500, James K. Love wrote:
> All:
> 
> I posted this to debian-hppa, but I thought I'd pass this along to
> parisc-linux in case anyone isn't a member of both lists. If you are,
> I apologize in advance for cluttering you inbox...
> 
> Could someone provide some details about why the TEAC floppy disk drives
> (scsi) in the 9000 series workstations are not supported in the parisc
> port?

At one point I thought they did work.

>   Is it due to a lack of documentation, missing sd/53c700 support for
> floppy drives, or lack of interest in floppy devices in general (or some
> combination of the three)?

THere is clearly a lack of interest in the non-scsi floppy.
I've handed out some SCSI floppy drives in the past.

>   I realize floppy drives are antiquated and
> scsi floppy drives are an enigma, but the application I'd like to run on
> these machines requires floppy support, which worked fine under HP-UX. 
> In an attempt investigate further, I installed MKLinux on a 715, and the
> scsi floppy drive was supported through some combination of the MACH
> kernel and it's hosted Linux kernel.  I've looked through the MKLinux
> source code, and it appears that the MACH scsi driver had some support
> for flexible disk drives (which I assume is the floppy drive), but I'm
> uncertain if this is the only missing piece to the puzzle.  If anyone
> has any additional info/insight, I'd really appreciated it.

If you can figure out what's missing between linux and MKlinux there
is a good change it could get added. The closer you get to providing
a patch, the more likely it will get included.

hth,
grant