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BSD Operating Systems

Firewire Updates For Scheduled FreeBSD 4.8 Release 34

Posted by timothy from the making-movies-and-more dept.
Dan writes "Hidetoshi Shimokawa has added new functionality to Firewire scheduled for FreeBSD 4.8 release. New features include built-in DV support, improved recovery process & timeout stability and Write/ioctl support for /dev/fwmem0. He has not tested this on PAL and is looking for volunteers."
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Firewire Updates For Scheduled FreeBSD 4.8 Release More

Firewire Updates For Scheduled FreeBSD 4.8 Release

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  • Dump without tape! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by noctrnl9 ( 601918 ) <smithc@NoSPam.eng.morgan.edu> on Saturday February 15, 2003 @03:41PM (#5309525) Homepage
    I think this is going to be great for dump/restore backups. not to mention the potential to dump raw DV footage from the source to a portable drive while in to field. Then there is the fact that 100MB/s (1394b) & 400MB/s (1394(?)) is just a question of time.
    • I don't know if you were implying it or not, but it seems some folks have figured out how to use a DV camcorder to store data. :)

      • Video Tape Backup Howto (Score:5, Funny)

        by Groganz ( 552205 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @10:05PM (#5311462)
        1. Point your video camera at screen
        2. cat /dev/ad0s1a
      • That doesn't sound very hard. I'd think one could pretty much wrap the data up so it would look like the proper type of MPEG frames and spit out as you would any other DV stream.

        Anyone have a link to someone who's done this? How much capacity is there on a DV tape?

        • And it would make a hell of a movie combined with some magic mushrooms, lsd, or other hallucinogenic.

          • Try playing a C64 data tape in a normal deck or a CD-ROM in an audio player (if it will play at all). That's the kind of stuff you're going to experience! Hopefully it'll be more pleasing visually..
          • I doubt it. Since it's digital, and MPEG, I suspect that it would just be detected as invalid video. Then again, I could be wrong. If anyone finds any cool sekrit messages from the aliens in their DV-encoded backups, let me know.
        • Check out Backfire [ajwm.net]. Sadly, it hasn't been updated in ~2 years though. The idea of that project is to encapsulate the data as movie frames, so it should be possible.

          If you search on google around the Groups, this topic appears a few times. I don't know of anyone who has gotten it to work though, and for as many people who question the integrity of data stored on a DV camera, there's just as many who think it would work fine. Maybe if the data was compressed with some sort of error checking/correction beforehand..
      • The idea is not a good one if only because DV's error correction is not robust enough for this sort of thing. Another poster mentioned compensating for this ahead of time w/compression and redundancy, but the idea still gives me the shudders.
    • to a portable drive

      Last time I saw a portable Firewire drive, the performance sucked big time. Turns out the actual drive was IDE.
    • Actually I was referring to the roots (AT&T) of the dump/restore commands as a means of archiving. In addition, there is the fact that 1394 [1394ta.org] is a standard that allows peer to peer isochronous and asynch video/audio/data transfer. [1394ta.org] this means the: iLink [1394ta.org] port on the PS2 [playstation.com] can be networked with another PS2; a 1394 drive could be networked with a computer that has a 1394 port (replacing the SCSI tape drive; or a DV camera could transfer information to a fro. Once the divice drivers mature. I know the applications of the technology will open various combinations of data transfer over a wide (50MB/s 1394a, 100MB/s 1394b, and 400MB/s 1394{?}) data pipeline.
    • 1394 already does 400MB. 1394b however will do up to 3.2GB. 1394ta [1394ta.org] 1394b [e-insite.net]
  • I'mw riting FireWire support for QNX, and having that to look at will be helpful.

    Linux support for FireWire isn't very general yet. The bus reset logic needs work, and the isochronous support only appears to support one device (on channel zero) at a time.

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