On Jul 30, 2019, at 9:17 PM, systems_glitch via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Someone's been working on porting ImageDisk to I believe Linux, maybe one of the BSDs. I don't know if it's something abusing I/O ports directly or if it's talking through kernel interfaces to FDCs. That opens up possibilities for supporting a lot of older 8" formats, even if not as mountable FSes.
Interesting. I know Linux has a facility (I think it's either an ioctl or some sysfs thing, but those neurons are a bit dusty) for talking to I/O ports from userland. I used that to read some GPIO pins from an x86 SBC a number of years ago for a project. Needs to be privileged (for obvious reasons), but doesn't need to be kernel code. Timing is probably more of a challenge from userland, though, and if the floppy block device could be extended to support additional options (I assume you'd need to be able to set things like hard sectoring?), you could make some interesting headway there. - Dave