Re: FireWire harddrives
Balazs,
My consulting client is a vendor of firewire hard drives, WiebeTech at
http://www.wiebetech.com/
What WiebeTech supplies are adapters that allow you to use IDE drives on a
firewire bus, as well as complete drive enclosures along with the drives that do
that. They recently released a firewire RAID that got a favorable review at
http://www.barefeats.com/
I've been working on custom mods to the firmware of the chip that does the bus
bridging. It's really a pretty cool chip. It's really interesting to program
and challenging to debug.
The people at WiebeTech have been really great to me, BTW.
I'm not sure if anyone makes a drive that directly supports firewire, that is, a
drive that does not use an IDE disk controller with a bridge like the Oxford 911.
I believe it is possible to boot from a firewire drive, but I haven't tried it
yet. I do plan to try and write a little HOWTO about it. You will need a BIOS
that supports booting - modern Macintoshes can boot from firewire drives, and
have the firewire port built-in. You can get PCI cards with firewire ports that
work on both Macs and PCs, but I'm not sure whether there is a PCI card that
provides a BIOS that allows booting. It would be a natural thing to do though.
A complication is that the firewire support in Linux only works as a module. I
understand the way to deal with this is to create an initrd that contains the
module in a temporary root filesystem, load the modules that you need, and
continue booting to mount root on your firewire drive.
You will need the ieee1394 and sbp2 modules. You will need to enable SCSI in
your kernel, because SBP2 hard drive access is a form of the SCSI protocol. You
will need either the pcilynx or the ohci1394 modules as drivers for your
firewire controller, most controllers lately are ohci but pcilynx cards can
still be had.
(An advantage of pcilynx cards is that they support bus sniffing, like the
promiscuous mode of an ethernet card. This isn't allowed for at all in the OHCI
spec. When I started doing my firewire work for WiebeTech, they bought me a
couple PCILynx CardBus cards from Newer Technology. Newer is out of business
but you can still get the cards from the people who bought their inventory.
There isn't yet support under Linux for sniffing, but I'm planning on writing it
when I know more about firewire. You can get a free sniffer for classic macos
called "firebug" from apple.)
Mike
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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