+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1664997 +++

Description of problem:
It's 2018, and we still provide a virtual floppy device for new virtual machines we intend to support for many, many years.

Maintaining the floppy device model in qemu-kvm has been expensive.  After VENOM (CVE-2015-3456), upstream suppressed the floppy controller for modern machine types by default (commit ea96bc629cb), because "It is Very annoying to carry forward an outdatEd coNtroller with a mOdern Machine type."  Users can still get floppy devices, but they have to ask for them.  This is a compromise that makes sense for upstream.

We tried to get rid of floppies in RHEL-7 (released in 2014), but ultimately failed, because RHEV could not move its Windows setup method from floppies to CD-ROMs in time.  If we had succeeded, we would've spared significant work and also embarrassment.

For backward compatibility, we need to continue to support floppies with RHEL-7 machine types.  However, supporting them with new machines makes no sense at all.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
qemu-kvm-3.1.0-3.el8

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run qemu-kvm with RHEL-8 machine type:
$ qemu-kvm -nodefaults -display none -S -M pc-q35-rhel8.0.0 -monitor stdio -device isa-fdc
2. Check devices:
(qemu) info qtree

Actual results:
There is an isa-fdc device:
        bus: isa.0
          type ISA
          dev: isa-fdc, id ""

Expected results:
-device isa-fdc is rejected in step 1.

Alternate reproducer: replace -device isa-fdc by -drive if=floppy.

Additional info:
The isa-fdc device gets created when the user asks for it explicitly with -device isa-fdc or implicitly with -drive if=floppy.

The explicit way is pretty useless actually, because it creates only the floppy controller, and there is no way to connect floppy drives to it (commit 0533a6ee98f makes device "floppy" unavailable with -device).

--- Additional comment from Martin Tessun on 2019-02-05 13:51:05 UTC ---

I believe floppies are currently used for the following tasks:
- Windows driver disks
- Windows sysprep information
- cloud-init data
- Kickstart information for RHEL

I believe all of these usecases could be replaced by an ISO instead.
@Michal: Do you agree? If we do this, we will need to change RHV 4.4 once we use RHEL8 based machine types. This would also remove the ISA driver from qemu completely.
@Erwan: Does RHOSP use floppies at all?