Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 15:14:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Donald Burr of Borg <dburr@borg-cube.com> To: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Cc: FreeBSD Hardware <freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org> Subject: Any plans for FireWire/iLink (IEEE1394) support? Or does it exist? Message-ID: <20010525150406.D56784-100000@localhost>
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I recently purchased a nifty new laptop (Sony Vaio PCG-FX120), and surprise surprise, it had a iLink (aka Firewire, aka IEEE1394) port on it. I needed a CD-RW drive that I could take with me on trips or whatnot, so I decided to purchase a firewire external CD-RW drive, since I've heard so many horror stories about USB drives being flaky/poor performance. All in all I am quite happy with this combination... I can read and burn CD's with absolutely flawless performance under WindowsME (amazingly enough... haven't made any coasters yet!) and this weekend I was playing with Linux and I even got cdrecord to burn to it under Linux using the sbp2(?) driver (basically does SCSI emulation over firewire). In fact I like this combo so much that I decided to get a Firewire card for my desktop PC. Now I can use the CD burner on either machine, and I can even connect the desktop and laptop machines together with firewire and use it as an extremely high speed, point-to-point network interface. File transfers have never been so quick as this! So, my question is this: Will FreeBSD be gettin' some of this wonderfully fiery goodness? Does FireWire support already exist, in some form or another, perhaps in CURRENT? If not, are there any definite plans to add support for it at some point down the line? A quick grep of /sys/i386/conf on a CURRENT source tree shows nothing about 1394 or Firewire, so it seems as though the answer is no... :( Please correct me if I'm wrong! At this point, the ability to use external devices, such as hard disks and CD-ROM/R/RW drives is the most important to me. (CD access more of a priority than hard disk access, since I, as yet, do not own a firewire hard drive) I don't particularly care about other applications of firewire, e.g. digital video. (Okay, I admit it, that is a lie. I do care about digital video, since I also happen to own a Sony digital camcorder. But, since there are, as yet, no video editing tools a la Adobe Premiere for Linux/FreeBSD, I just do all my DV editing under Windows. DV support under FreeBSD would be *nice*, but not a priority by any means.) -- Donald Burr of Borg <dburr@borg-cube.com> | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! WWW: http://www.borg-cube.com/ ICQ #16997506 | http://www.freebsd.org/ P.O. Box 91212, Santa Barbara, CA 93190-1212 \----------------------------- Phone: (805)957-9666 Present Day... Present Time! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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