Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi(jeffgeerling.com)

4 points by thomasjb 54 days ago | 4 comments

MisterTea 54 days ago |

I always feel Apple made a real blunder with the FireWire licensing situation. FW was really interesting: It was a real memory mapped computer bus like PCI that also supported peer-to-peer operation. It was vastly superior to USB and had a lot of potential. That is, if you knew that Firewire was Apple's trademark, I.LINK was Sony's, Lynx was Texas Instruments, and generic IEEE-1394/1394 labels everyone non-technical was supposed to somehow understand. Great tech hamstrung by greed.

IcePic 54 days ago | |

Then again, remote DMA to your memory via a port on the computer, while a great tool for debugging internal stuff, is also quite the wide door to getting hacked if someone every manages to plug in a malicious device in the same port.

geerlingguy 54 days ago | | |

It's funny how we've come back around to this, with the M3 Mac Studios allowing you to enable RDMA over Thunderbolt. You have to toggle the setting via a firmware change, but it's there for performance!

FireWire was pretty wild in its day. It just got hampered by the per-port licensing fee, and once USB 2.0 rolled out, its days were numbered for anyone not needing the latency/power features.

MisterTea 54 days ago | | |

IOMMU solved this issue with virtual memory mapping for MIMO hardware.