dk-disks polls floppy drives for media every couple of seconds. Constantly doing so is noisy and wears out the drive mechanics unnecessarily. In the hal era we didn't do that either, so I think floppy disks should be blacklisted from polling.
The polling method is also noisy, causing kernel messages to be written to text consoles: .... [355682.176027] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 [355684.176029] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 [355686.176036] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 [355688.176026] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 ....
ACK, this badly needs fixing. I haven't gotten to this because Fedora doesn't automatically load floppy.ko (yeah, bad excuse). I'm going to be in the office on Wednesday so I'll fix it then (I don't have a box with a floppy drive at home).
In Ubuntu we don't force floppy.ko either, it just seems to get autoloaded with the normal udev/modalias mechanism. Unfortunately I can't personally help with debugging here, it's been ages since I had my last floppy drive, but I'm happy to relay testing questions to the reporter, or create some test packages for him. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/384579 has some udev log and devkit-disks --dump on a computer where a floppy is detected, so that might help.
By the way, you’d expect it would be possible to do a noiseless poll with the floppy drive. AmigaOS did the clicky poll periodically, and someone created a utility that made it silent. It worked perfectly. http://aminet.net/disk/misc/anticlick.readme
Fixed on master: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/DeviceKit/DeviceKit-disks/commit/?id=b95485015a9fe8ec2c38bf305029410d5ddab062
(In reply to comment #4) > By the way, you’d expect it would be possible to do a noiseless poll with the > floppy drive. > > AmigaOS did the clicky poll periodically, and someone created a utility that > made it silent. It worked perfectly. > > http://aminet.net/disk/misc/anticlick.readme > Maybe it worked perfectly on Amiga hardware but PC hardware is a lot more cheap/varied. Actually, it almost worked in Windows 95 but not quite so - see http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/04/02/9528175.aspx for a good write up.
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