ftape

Someone was still working on some minor cleanups in August 2025: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250825163545.39303-1-andriy.s... (That mail also mentions the floppy driver is "basically orphaned" though. But evidently it's still there and builds.) Maybe you're thinking of the floppy tape (ftape) driver, which was removed back in the 2.6.20 kernel. Though there's a project keeping an out-of-tree version of it working with recent kernels at https://github.com/dbrant/ftape

"The intention is to compile this driver as an out-of-tree kernel module, without needing to copy it into the kernel source tree. That's why there's just a simple Makefile, and no other affordances for kernel inclusion. I can't really imagine any further need to build this driver into the kernel itself. The last version of the driver that was included in the kernel, right up until it was removed, was version 3.04. BUT, the author continued to develop the driver independently of kernel releases. In fact, the last known version of the driver was 4.04a, in 2000. My goal is to continue maintaining this driver for modern kernel versions, 25 years after the last official release." - https://github.com/dbrant/ftape