Matthew Garrett wrote:
ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that
machines
will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives
attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of
drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely
havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded,
which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.
I think it's sad that we're sacrificing hardware support for boot times.
We should probe for everything by default. Users who don't have a floppy
drive and want to save some boot time can blacklist the driver manually.
Kevin Kofler