As we prepare to enter 2023, the Linux kernel’s floppy driver is still being maintained. As developers work toward a stable release of Linux 6.2, to be announced around February, ahead of next week’s Linux 6.2 merge window, which will be the first major Linux release of 2023, it is interesting to note that there is still some focus on the floppy disk drive in this release.
Denis Efremov submitted a floppy driver pull request to Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe for a driver update for Linux 6.2. Floppy driver updates are rare, but the authors still seem to care about it for the latest kernel code.
The purpose of this floppy driver update is that the new floppy driver will address memory leaks in its initialization path in Linux 6.2 when calls to floppy_alloc_disk() fail.
This memory leak in the floppy driver has been present in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11 in 2020. In recent years, it has been mostly a fix for the floppy driver. Earlier this year it was the disabled FDRAWCMD post-release re-reference vulnerability, the problem manifested itself in the system getting stuck if a corrupt floppy disk was ejected. In addition to this, there have been other fixes for the floppy driver in recent years.
The floppy driver memory leak fix is now part of the block driver changes prepared for Linux 6.2 and is also marked back to the current Linux kernel stable series.
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