[Fedora-music-list] F10 in trouble?

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

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).