Comment 137 for bug 539515

Arrigo Marchiori [2010-09-01 22:42 -0000]:
> If the above script takes a very long time to execute, then Martin's
> patch is probably the only way to cope with the non-existing floppy
> drives: even a open() call takes too long, and the problem must be
> fixed in the kernel or somewhere else.

Perhaps there is a kernel workaround for this, but this is precisely
the reason why making floppies work is so ridiculously hard. Almost no
machines have been sold with an actual floppy drive for many years
now, but a lot of motherboards still have floppy *controllers*. Thus
the BIOS and Linux still detect a /dev/df0, but once you want to talk
to it, there is never an answer (because there is no floppy behind
it), and thus the calls just time out.

So we need to avoid automatically open()'ing /dev/fd0 at all cost,
while still providing a manual way of checking for media.