Status of FireWire/IEEE1394/SBP2 in FC2?

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 04:23, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On May  5, 2004, RaXeT <maxer1 at xmission.com> wrote:
> 
> > Well I just don't understand. I can compile the firewire drivers in
> > any of the kernels.  Currently working very well in
> > 2.6.5-1.350. Again why can't someone just go in and make the drivers
> > modules in any future kernel is beyond me.
> 
> The problem is that arjan got a lot of bug reports about boxes hanging
> on boot, and it turned out to be a problem with firewire, so he took
> it out, and now he won't turn it back up unless he's proven ieee1394
> is fixed.  I know for fact that it isn't fixed, so we got into sort of
> a stalemate.  He talked me into believing it might be too risky to
> ship FC2 with firewire support that would prevent even the installer
> from booting for people who happen to have firewire controllers but
> don't care about them (the majority), and that we'd be better off
> shipping without firewire and issuing an update with it enabled, and
> meanwhile I'd work on supplying people with firewire support for the
> installer and the shipped kernel until this update goes out.
> 
> I understand this is not ideal for a number of firewire users, myself
> included, but it sounded like a reasonable trade off to me.
> Unfortunate, but reasonable.

I understand that you don't want to have systems freezing on people for
a feature that they don't want in the first place.  I guess many, if not
most, firewire users don't need firewire at install time anyway, but
rather on the system after installation to hook up their digital video
camera or similar.  So, I think the most important thing is to have a
simple way of installing a firewire-enabled kernel as an option.  As
long as it is installed in addition to the non-firewire kernel, people
can just boot back into the non-firewire kernel if the firewire-enabled
one freezes their system.

Are you going to release extra rpms for a firewire kernel?

Cheers,
Manuel