Re: [PATCH 00/23] Floppy driver cleanups

Willy Tarreau
2020-03-31T11:04:44Z

Hi Christoph,

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 03:10:19AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Hi Willy,
>
> given that you are actively maintaining the floppy driver now,

No no no I'm not! Denis is :-) Really, I mean I just proposed some help
to clean up this mess after being tricked into not believing a bug report
just because the code was too confusing.

> any
> chance I could trick you into proper highmem handling? I've been trying
> to phase out block layer bounce buffering, and any help from a competent
> maintainer to move their drivers to properly support highmem by kmapping
> for PIO/MMIO I/O would be very helpful.

I'm not sure what this implies regarding this code, to be honest. It's
very tricky and implements sort of a state machine using function pointers
within its interrupt handler so you never know exactly what accesses what,
and quite a part of it remains obscure to me :-/ I can accept to help, I
can even run tests since I still have running hardware, but I'd at least
need some guidance. And probably Denis would know better than me there.
Also I doubt we'd get sufficient testing on less common archs. While I
do have sparc64/parisc/alpha available, I haven't booted a recent kernel
on any of them for a while (2.4 used to be the last ones), and I'm not
sure it's reasonable to go into such changes without proper testing.

What do you think ?

Willy