Comment 25 for bug 1054414

But even in the log without a floppy drive, the kernel detects one:

[ 2.266143] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

There are some differences between the "dmesg without" (-) and "dmesg with" (+) logs:

-end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
+EXT3-fs (fd0): error: can't find ext3 filesystem on dev fd0.
+EXT4-fs (fd0): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
+FAT-fs (fd0): bogus number of reserved sectors
+FAT-fs (fd0): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem

Which mostly confirm that the floppy isn't working properly in the first case.

udev sees *exactly* the same devices in both cases:

$ diff -u <(grep -v USEC_INITIALIZED export_without.txt) <(grep -v USEC_INITIALIZED export_with.txt)

is empty.

P: /devices/platform/floppy.0/block/fd0
N: fd0
E: DEVNAME=/dev/fd0
E: DEVPATH=/devices/platform/floppy.0/block/fd0
E: DEVTYPE=disk
E: ID_DRIVE_FLOPPY=1
E: MAJOR=2
E: MINOR=0
E: SUBSYSTEM=block
E: UDEV_LOG=3
E: UDISKS_PRESENTATION_NOPOLICY=1
E: USEC_INITIALIZED=27196738

So this seems to be mostly a VMWare bug that even if you configure without a floppy drive, it still emulates a floppy controller without any drive attached. Unfortunately there is very little that we can do in userspace to work around this; floppies come from an age where detailled automatic hardware detection was still not existant :( As soon as you try to probe a floppy in this case, you will get 30 second uninterruptible kernel hangs, so we must not try to touch floppies unless the user explicitly tries to mount one.