Linux: New FireWire Stack Update

“Kristian Høgsberg posted an update on the effort to
rewrite the Linux kernel FireWire stack explaining, ‘as you may
know, we’ve been working on a new FireWire stack over on
linux1394-devel. The main driver behind this work is to get a
small, maintainable and supportable FireWire stack, with an
acceptable backwards compatibility story.’ He went on to request
the stack’s inclusion in the mainline kernel, listing the following
highlights: the new FireWire stack ‘has been in Fedora rawhide
(development branch) and -mm for 3 months, will be shipping in
Fedora 7; backwards compatible at the library level, existing user
space libraries have been ported to use the new user space
interface; less than 8k lines of code compared to 30k lines of code
in the old stack, and a similar size reduction in the sizes of the
.ko’s; no kernel threads, compared to one subsystem thread and one
thread per FireWire controller in the old stack; one user space
interface to support zero-copy scatter-gather streaming, as opposed
to the old stacks 4 (was 5) different streaming interfaces;
per-device device files, letting userspace set up more finegrained
access control, such as preventing direct access to FireWire
storage devices…'”

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