Linux Floppy Driver For Apple's Super Woz Integrated Machine "SWIM" In Old Macs Improved
([Apple] 3 Hours Ago
2026 Work)
- Reference: 0001646727
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-2026-Apple-SWIM-Floppy
- Source link:
This is quite unexpected and was not on my bingo card for this year or even decade... The Linux driver for the floppy disk controller in Apple's legacy Super Woz Integrated Machine (SWIM) saw a large set of patches today for improving its performance and delivering various fixes.
The Linux swim floppy driver is used for Macintosh 68k era hardware with the Super Wozniak Integrated Machine floppy disk controller IC. The SWIM chip was first introduced back in 1988. These 2026 Linux driver improvements were successfully tested on the Apple Mac Quadra 650, LC III, Quadra 700, and IIvx. Linux m68k developer Finn Thain posted the set of 31 patches today for improving the swim driver to deliver various bug fixes and enhancing the stability, compatibility, and performance for the floppy disk support on these old Macintosh platforms.
Finn Thain explained with the cover letter for the 31 patch [1]series :
"I recently had a need for the 'swim' driver but found that it was too buggy to be useful for my purposes. I had two aims in mind--
Firstly, I needed this driver to help me test my new BMoW Floppy Emu for emulation correctness. Being that Linux is open source and MacOS is not, this driver should be ideal for that.
Secondly, I needed to realign the heads in some disk drives. The swim driver has most of the code needed for a feedback loop for manual re-alignment, so I wrote the remaining code and pushed it to a repo here: https://github.com/fthain/linux/commits/swim/
These patches fix all the bugs I found. They improve stability, compatibility and performance. Additional patches improve source code quality by removing redundant code and cleaning up a bit.
This patch series was successfully tested on the following systems.
Mac Quadra 650 - SWIM 2 with Mitsubishi FDD
Mac LC III - SWIM 2 with Mitsubishi FDD and Sony FDD
Mac Quadra 700 - SWIM with Sony FDD
Mac IIvx - SWIM with Sony FDD"
So in 2026, surprisingly, there are still substantive open-source Linux driver improvements being made for benefiting floppy disk support on ancient Macs.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1784196135.git.fthain@linux-m68k.org/
The Linux swim floppy driver is used for Macintosh 68k era hardware with the Super Wozniak Integrated Machine floppy disk controller IC. The SWIM chip was first introduced back in 1988. These 2026 Linux driver improvements were successfully tested on the Apple Mac Quadra 650, LC III, Quadra 700, and IIvx. Linux m68k developer Finn Thain posted the set of 31 patches today for improving the swim driver to deliver various bug fixes and enhancing the stability, compatibility, and performance for the floppy disk support on these old Macintosh platforms.
Finn Thain explained with the cover letter for the 31 patch [1]series :
"I recently had a need for the 'swim' driver but found that it was too buggy to be useful for my purposes. I had two aims in mind--
Firstly, I needed this driver to help me test my new BMoW Floppy Emu for emulation correctness. Being that Linux is open source and MacOS is not, this driver should be ideal for that.
Secondly, I needed to realign the heads in some disk drives. The swim driver has most of the code needed for a feedback loop for manual re-alignment, so I wrote the remaining code and pushed it to a repo here: https://github.com/fthain/linux/commits/swim/
These patches fix all the bugs I found. They improve stability, compatibility and performance. Additional patches improve source code quality by removing redundant code and cleaning up a bit.
This patch series was successfully tested on the following systems.
Mac Quadra 650 - SWIM 2 with Mitsubishi FDD
Mac LC III - SWIM 2 with Mitsubishi FDD and Sony FDD
Mac Quadra 700 - SWIM with Sony FDD
Mac IIvx - SWIM with Sony FDD"
So in 2026, surprisingly, there are still substantive open-source Linux driver improvements being made for benefiting floppy disk support on ancient Macs.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1784196135.git.fthain@linux-m68k.org/