Have done a self test on the floppy drive--OK. On boot, the floppy drive seems to be detected by the kernel--OK. However, mounting or formatting disks fail. The same commands and disks work fine on the Intel boxes, but cause I/O errors or complete hangs on the Ultra 5.
Same drive works fine in Solaris, formats, mounts, reads OK. Used brand new floppy and performed df on Intel with results: Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% /dev/fd0 7415699 666085 6365261 9% However, df in Linux on Ultra 5 of same new floppy returns: /dev/fd0 5375599 1037830 4059435 20% dmesg from bootup reports: FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306
I am working on this bug, I've known about it for some time. If things work out, the upcoming kernel erratas will fix this problem. It only happens on Ultra5/Ultra10 systems, other PCI and SBUS Sparcs should be OK about floppies for the most part.
I've found and fixed this bug. It will be fixed in the upcoming kernel updates...