The Linux 7.4 block/storage and IO_uring updates were merged today for the ongoing merge window. With the breadth of Linux hardware support, the pull request varies from fixes to Linux's floppy driver to enabling support for NVMe storage on Apple M4 devices.

On the old hardware side, the Linux floppy disk driver continues to see bug fixes once in a while... With Linux 7.4, a few more fixes have trickled in. Denis Efremov of Oracle fixed a possible stack out of bounds issue with the floppy driver as reported by the Kernel Address Sanitizer. He also fixed a regression in the floppy driver from a code refactoring that took place all the way back in 2017. Now the flags for the floppy drive struct should be properly handled.

Separately, Cen Zhang found some data races within the floppy driver found by unspecified "our tools" that presumably are around AI tooling.

This pull request also brought fixes to the SWIM (Sander Woz Integrated Machine) driver for old Apple Macintosh floppy disk controllers. Those SWIM driver fixes were by Finn Thain of the Linux m68k community after a noted recent need to use the diver but found it "too buggy to be useful" for his purposes. In total 33 fixes were addressed and it was successfully tested on the Mac Quadra 650, Mac LC III, Mac Quadra 700, and Mac IIvx.

Then on the newer side of the hardware spectrum, the Linux 7.4 pull request for the block subsystem brought Apple M4 T8132 ANS2 NVMe support. Details on that within the prior article Linux Patches Enable Apple M4 NVMe Support.

Quite a variety of old and new in the block pull request now merged for Linux 7.4.