Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
Delightful that this still works. It would be interesting to go through the kernel tree and see how much maintenance goes into Firewire related code. Other than pulling data off of old devices, I wonder how many people are out there still using Firewire.
There's still a thriving (albeit small) community of skateboarders, retro enthusiasts, and even some AV pros who have FireWire equipment in active use.
In the kernel, the last commit in the IEEE 1394 area was a month or so ago—it's not 'active' maintenance, but its definitely being maintained, and is quite stable in my testing. (Thanks a ton to the current maintainer, who's going to go through the 3 year process of sunsetting full kernel support, and coordinating that with external projects!)
Why sunset it, though? There’s still floppy, atapi, and zip support.
Every Apple device from the late 90s to 2012 had FireWire. Most Sony PCs from the late 90s to 2009. Google estimates that at over 100M systems with FireWire. There were 50M Zip drives, in comparison.
I know I should probably move on, but I have a lot of FireWire block devices and video equipment. The disk/disc drives can be moved to USB, but the video equipment cannot.
People moved from "good to have" to "better to throw it out because it's unmaintained so it's not secure".
And floppy support is needed for cloud-init, heh.
1 reply →
That’s actually pretty cool, I’m surprised there’s skateboarders that still use VX1000s or whatever instead of moving on to GoPros etc
Older cameras have a certain "look" that can be hard to manually reproduce. I've been considering getting an older digital (maybe DV) camcorder for exactly that reason, I find that "look" very charming, and it makes it look more like what I associate with a "home video"
There is an industry of capturing old tape formats to digital files. One place I was at had tape decks of every format form 3/4" U-matic all the way to HDCAM-SR with everything in between. The DV type decks were studio that had SDI outs, but from time to time, we'd have someone with a tape that just would not work in anything we had, except one of the employee's personal camera. We'd connect it to a firewire port on the front of a Mac, and keep on truckin'
The F-35 uses firewire [0].
[0]https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060009084/downloads/20...
Firewire user here! I have an old-but-very-functional rack mixer (Presonus) that will cost £700+ to replace, _plus_ I have to configure and set up the new one. I have a 2007 Macbook Pro that I keep around just for interfacing with it.
Same: a single StudioMix mixer with 2x FP10’s in the racks. This setup is just so lovely and functional I don’t want to upgrade it really, it just plain works. I have an old iMac as the DAW for the job, but the idea of replacing it with an ARM-based system, if it works, is so very appealing…
It's actively being maintained by Takashi Sakamoto. Here's the commit for Linux 7.0-rc1.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/0d6dd4738dbcc32b60c...