On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 15:18 -0500, Jarod Wilson wrote: > On Wednesday 21 January 2009 14:45:27 Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: > > Sigh. Firewire. Fedora. Sigh. Faado will only work with the Planet CCRMA > > kernel because the Fedora kernel still insists in shipping with the new > > stack only > > The new stack beats the pants off the old one in pretty much every single > area except this one. Very irrelevant for firewire audio interface users. In any particular distribution there is always a tradeoff between having the latest shiny stuff and having it also work (ie: how bleeding edge is the combination of packages and capabilities that make up a distro). I don't think I have seen many cases (well, any) where a distro bricks a whole class of hardware devices (ie: they were working before the "upgrade" and they don't work after the "upgrade") and does not fix it. Even after users complain. Specially if all those devices remain useless bricks for several releases. The message is clear, I got it: if you want working firewire audio devices go somewhere else[*]. Or hack your system in several unsupportable ways. I tried doing that for quite a while for Planet CCRMA, eventually gave up. Actually, I'd be surprised if there were _any_ audio users left using Fedora and Planet CCRMA that need to use firewire audio interfaces. They probably left a long time ago. Because you see, it did not work and it does not work, and that _is_ important. For those users, the performance and advantages of the new stack are NIL. > In a pinch, you can replaced *just* the firewire > drivers in the Fedora kernel w/o having to use an entirely different kernel. Sigh. I'm not replacing the kernel because the firewire drivers are not working. I am replacing the kernel because I need a low latency kernel for critical audio work, and Fedora does not and will not provide that. As a side effect firewire audio devices work. And that is possible without further ugly hacks because fc10 includes libraw1394 2.x. Before, for a long time, the hacks multiplied (incompatible libraries to begin with!!! - meaning it is not possible to boot into the two different stacks!). "In a pinch" Fedora should have provided that from the beginning. If it could not it should have delayed the release till _now_, when we are _beginning_ to see a stack and libraries stable enough for use with the juju broken hardware (and specially libraries that can deal with both stacks - those appeared only in fc10). And Fedora could/should have provided a migration path. This has been beaten to death many times before, I don't know why I'm bothering to write this response. > Note that as of 2.6.30, I believe ffado should work just fine with the > new firewire stack (based on a discussion I vaguely recall on the > linux1394 mailing list). Quite a bit of work has gone into libraw1394, > libiec61883 and the firewire drivers in the past month. Maybe it will work. Maybe not. But right now and for the past 3 releases it has not worked. Sure, eventually it will work. And it will be fantastic. But there will be nobody left to use them in the Fedora world except for new users (till _they_ get burned by who knows what new interesting future idea of progress...). How many _years_ would _you_ wait for a solution if a distro willingly bricked a device you needed? Sorry, I appreciate the work you put into this, just don't tell me how good is something that is actually useless for me. -- Fernando [*] Look, I'm still around because I do not currently _depend_ on firewire devices for my machines (look up CCRMA, around 50 linux high performance fanless audio workstations running Fedora plus the associated servers, etc, etc). If I did, I probably would have migrated away a long time ago. And to tell the truth I will stay around only while the pain associated with staying is lower than the pain associated with a migration, and lately the pain gap seems to be getting smaller (and also because I know that the grass is not always greener somewhere else... but you know, sometimes it actually is). _______________________________________________ Fedora-music-list mailing list Fedora-music-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-music-list
