Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed
Linux kernel 6.2 should contain fixes for some problems handling floppy disks, a move which shows that someone somewhere is still using them.
This isn't the only such fix in recent years. As a series of articles on Phoronix details, there has been a slow but steady flow of fixes for the kernel's handling of floppy drives since at least kernel 5.17, as The Reg mentioned when it came out. Which implies that there are still people actively using floppy diskettes on machines with fairly current Linux kernels on them. If you are one of them, do let us know.
Back in July 2016, SUSE kernel developer Jiři Kosina submitted a patch. The problem arose because this change broke something else and later got reverted, and so the problem hung around.
In July last year, he sent in a new patch that fixed it again for the 5.12 kernel, and was later back-ported to 5.10, an LTS version, and again into kernel 5.15 – another an LTS version, and the one you're running today if you're on the current Ubuntu LTS release, or something built from it such as Linux Mint 21.