Fedora too cutting edge?

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Wed Jan 9 20:56:54 UTC 2008


Will Woods wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 19:45 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> One of the few reasons why Fedora is my distro of choice is because its usually 
>> cutting edge, and I like to be where the development is happening.
>>
>> However today I've had an encounter with Fedora which make me wonder if 
>> sometimes we aren't a little too cutting edge. I tried to get an industrial 
>> firewire camera to work with the stock Fedora kernel using the juju stack. Long 
>> story short, it didn't work.
>>
>> Which after reading: http://wiki.linux1394.org/JujuMigration Isn't really 
>> surprising, quoting that page: "Almost no support for IIDC cameras: Not 
>> compatible with libdc1394 v1. Highly experimental support in libdc1394 v2 which 
>> works with some luck on only a few OHCI 1.1 controllers. Improvements are to be 
>> expected in Linux 2.6.25-rc1."
>>
>> Notice how a preliminary fix is expected for 2.6.25, which probably means that 
>> this will still be broken in Fedora 9, notice that the breakage was introduced 
>> in Fedora 7, so thats 18 months worth of broken firewire camera support (iow 
>> most digital video cameras). Add to that that the above referenced wiki page 
>> also says: "Regarding Linux 2.6.22 and 2.6.23, the best advice to Linux 
>> distributors (kernel packagers) ... is: Build only the old IEEE 1394 drivers."
> 
> libdc1394 isn't part of Fedora, so that's outside the scope of this
> discussion. 
> 

Well actually it has been in review for quite a while, with the juju stack 
being one of the reasons for it not passing review yet (patents is another, but 
a patent free version is most likely possible).

I would like to work on getting this into Fedora, and if things could be fixed 
so as to work with the new stack, I'm all for it. Shipping something which 
still doesn't work in F-9 makes us look rather bad IMHO, doing new things can 
cause breakage, but breakage for 3 releases in a row?

> As for the necessary Juju bits, they're already in Fedora 7 and Fedora
> 8. See this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=344851
> 
> That fix is included in kernel 2.6.23.9-44.fc7, 2.6.23.9-78.fc8, and
> rawhide. It'll hit the *upstream* kernel in 2.6.25.
> 


As for this being fixed, not for my case, as I have a via vt 6306 controller, 
which is like, only the most common PC firewire controller on the planet.

Note that I'm more then willing to help debug this, I've added myself to the CC 
of: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=415841

Anything I van do to help?

Regards,

Hans




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