Hi,

I am watching this issue for a long while, due to my
floppy-blacklist.conf file since next-20110603.

The bad: The boot-process stalls for approx 10-13 secs when booting
into my Debian/sid i386 system.

# dmesg | grep -A1 -B1 "end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0"
[    2.422854] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[   15.289939] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
[   15.342914] EXT4-fs (sda5): mounted filesystem with ordered data
mode. Opts: (null)

The funny part is my IBM laptop has no physical floppy drive!

# dmesg | egrep -i 'floppy|fd0'
[    0.726358] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
[   15.289939] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0

If I blacklist "floppy" kernel-module, the boot-process is as expected
without the above mentionned delay.

[ /etc/modprobe.d/floppy-blacklist.conf ]
# This file blacklists the floppy driver.
#
# XXX: Workaround: My IBM ThinkPad T40p (model 2374SG6) notebook has
no physical FDD
# dmesg from linux-next (next-20110603) says:
# [    0.755294] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
# [   15.238507] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
blacklist floppy
- EOF -

I searched for the line and found bool blk_update_request() in
block/blk-core.c file (see [1]).

I have attached kern.log and dmesg.

Hope this helps to narrow down the issue.

Kind Regards,
- Sedat -

[1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git;a=blob;f=block/blk-core.c#l2111