IEEE 1394 (FireWire) inclusion to 2.4?

[Andreas Bombe]

Hello linux-kernel,

I'm the maintainer of the IEEE 1394 (aka FireWire or iLink) subsystem
for Linux.  It has reached a state where it is usable already (although
not complete).  Isochronous receiving, which seems to be the most
interesting feature (wrt digital cameras), is just getting integrated.

Supported hardware is AIC5800 (not maintained currently), PCILynx and
OHCI.  Missing is a Sony 1394 chipset used in some (most?) of their
Vaio laptops.  Apart from x86, the PCILynx is run successfully on PPC
Linux (OHCI still has a small endianness issue that could be fixed
easily).  Other platforms: unknown so far.  SMP should work (not
heavily tested).

I'd like to get the subsystem into the mainstream kernel (and into 2.4
if possible), I'm asking for comments because of the freeze.  The
subsystem is self contained, it does not modify anything outside of its
drivers/ieee1394 directory apart from the usual Makefiles, config.ins
and Configure.help.  

It would be under CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL and probably stay so in the
stable series.  Still it would give someone a base to try it out.  The
latest and greatest between stable Linux releases would be in Linux
unstable or as it is now from separate patches or CVS.

If there are no serious objections I will send a patch to Linus in a
few days (after a bit of iso recv testing) and let him decide.

The homepage of the Linux 1394 project is on (might need a bit of
rework) http://eclipt.uni-klu.ac.at/ieee1394/ .  For the current
sources you best try CVS.

Along with the kernel side comes libraw1394, which is the only
supported interface to the raw1394 part of the kernel, allows raw
accesses to devices (analogous to SCSI generic) and iso receiving in
the CVS current version.  Most applications don't need more and can be
completely in user space (e.g. video stream receiving).

-- 
          Andreas E. Bombe <[e-mail]>
http://home.pages.de/~andreas.bombe/                DSA key 0x04880A44

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