One thing to keep in mind is that the swim3 driver in the Old World
Pmacs hasn't been properly updated for the 2.6 series of kernels. Last
I checked, I think the driver now compiles, but I can't remember if it
even works. I'll take a look soon.
A while back, I'd started looking at this driver with the purpose of
getting it working, and learning about kernel driver programming. I
had to drop it because of time constraints, etc ... But I think at
the end of August, I should be able to spend some time on this again
(i.e. getting the floppy driver working properly for 2.6)... If I can
pull it off, I can lend a hand with boot floppies. I'm very attached
to my 8500, and would like to keep it (fully) in service for as long
as possible :)
I had the driver somewhat cleaned up and working by replacing the old
interrupt calling routines with the updated versions. but my changes
were not SMP safe, and my attempts to put in SMP-safe interrupt calling
primitives locked up the machine when I tested the driver. I need to
go back and figure out how the driver works, and try to do the locking
cleanly and properly.