Bug#449272: Alternative (buggy, incomplete) firewire stack shipped instead of the stable one

["Alexandre Pereira Nunes" <alexandre.nunes@gmail.com>]

2007/11/4, maximilian attems <max@stro.at>:

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:32:46PM -0200, Alexandre Pereira Nunes wrote:
> Debian choose to ship the alternative firewire stack on recent kernels.
> Firewire maintainers are not recommending this (see
> http://wiki.linux1394.org/JujuMigration) yet, since this new firewire stack
> is incomplete. For instance, I can't do ethernet over firewire with 2.6.22,
> I have to go back to 2.6.18, which gives me other kind of trouble.

the switch has been made some time ago.
you are the *first* to holler due to ethernet over firewire!

please report bug upstream on bugzilla.kernel.org and let us know your
bug nr, see bottom of page http://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernelReportingBugs

regards

--
maks

What are you talking about? The support to the stable driver wasn't dropped from the kernel (just enable CONFIG_IEEE1394), the recommended policy upstream (from the maintainer's site, see the URL from my previous post) is to enable it, the maintainer's are well aware that the experimental stack only implement a limited subset of firewire functionality, so why should I file a bug there? Note that an upstream 
2.6.22 "make defconfig" does the right thing of selecting the stable drivers and not the experimental one, having it the other way around was a debian decision.

I'm not only talking about ip over firewire, there's at least another bug filed against firewire on debian's 
2.6.22 (something about an external storage device). The experimental driver is not supposed to work yet (again, see the URL).

This newer stack is not expected to get stable before 2.6.24, and in order to prevent further firewire reports on the meanwhile, CONFIG_IEEE1394 should be enabled (as well as the options it brings on the menu). The experimental driver should be disabled for now.

The forementioned site points out that not even the userspace library is ready, so many firewire camera programs and such won't operate on the newer stack yet.