Working Firewire in FC2?

Bruce P. Morin bpmorin at safepointetech.com
Sat May 15 02:11:55 UTC 2004


David,

Thanks for your response, but unfortunately we are from two different camps.
I am a user and a sysadmin, and I believe things should work out of the box,
as most end users would. This would include Firewire.

If SuSE has to apply over 1000 patches to the kernel, then this says two
things:

1. They really care about end users experience and want to make their
computing as hassle free as possible. 

2. There has got to be something wrong with the way that the kernel is
developed if it takes over 1000 patches to get the kernel to a point where
the end user can make use of it with common every day hardware i.e.
Firewire.

This last point is solidified by your comment "Sadly the code isn't as
great."

Your camp is the developer segment. It is my opinion that most developers
believe that EVERYONE should be able to recompile a kernel or ad arguments
to the boot up process. This thought process is flawed. Frankly, most end
users will NOT go to kernel.org and download the latest kernel and compile
it, so if the kernel is patched 1000 times, they won't care. Just so long as
the product does what it's supposed to do. 

Now, to your point, developers may care, but somewhere someone is going to
have to find a happy medium, especially since there are a number of
aggressive desktop initiatives coming down the pike, even your own company
is finally making the move. Either the kernel modules are going to have to
be coded better, or patches are going to have to be used. I too would like
to see things coded better, but if SuSE has to apply over a 1000 patches to
its kernel, I would say that asking for that is going to be an uphill
battle.

Scott McNealy once said, "It's not about the technology, it's about the
solution." If Linux is going to make any inroads in the Desktop arena, then
more developers are going to have to make this their credo.

Just my two cents,

Bruce






-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Jones [mailto:davej at redhat.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 1:37 PM
To: bpmorin at safepointetech.com; For testers of Fedora Core development
releases
Subject: RE: Working Firewire in FC2?

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 16:42, Bruce P. Morin wrote:
> Raxet,
> 
> That's too bad. SuSE gets this right

The current SuSE kernel has just under 1,000 patches (no exaggeration).
This is a path we're absolutely not taking with Fedora. What happens
when you want to run mainline 2.6.6 on a SuSE 9.1
installation? Answer: It'll explode the same way that it does in Fedora.

Red Hat has taken a beating in the past for heavily patched kernels
"I installed mainline, and everything broke, Red Hat are trying to
lock us into using their kernel, blah blah".

One of the goals of Fedora is to stick with mainline as closely as
possible. This means getting Firewire fixed *there* instead of carrying
around patches in a vendor tree.

> , out of the box plus their kernel is
> built with multi lun option turned on so most usb multi-card readers work
> without having to recompile the kernel.

How nice for them. Too bad this breaks when confronted with some
SCSI devices.  Also, you can fix this without recompiling the kernel..

(19:33:50:davej at delerium:davej)$ modinfo scsi_mod | grep luns
parm:           max_luns:last scsi LUN (should be between 1 and 2^32-1)
parm:           max_report_luns:REPORT LUNS maximum number of LUNS
received (should be between 1 and 16384)

If you find a device that does need max_luns fiddled with to work,
let us know, and we'll get that back to the upstream maintainers.
Then when you either a) use an upstream kernel or b) an updated
rebased fedora kernel, it'll work in both cases.

> RedHat has really never taken Firewire seriously as it has always been a
> struggle to get it working, and that's a shame as it is great technology.

Sadly the code isn't as great.

	Dave







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