Hah, I have a work blog. People have been nudging me to blog about my work on occasion and I've wanted to do so several times. My standing excuse have been that I don't want to clutter up my personal blog with work trivia and vice versa and I can't be bothered to figure out how to tag my posts. But it turns out it's as easy as just starting a separate blog. Gah.
So, what's going on work-wise these days. The last few days I've been severely side-tracked by the Adobe Reader 7.0.9 security errata, but hopefully that'll be over soon. Then it's back to FireWire, which is what I've been spending pretty much 100% of my time on the last couple of months. At Red Hat we'd like to ship and support FireWire, but the stability of the Linux FireWire stack has been hit and miss. Stefan Richter, the upstream maintainer, has been doing a great job of raising the quality level and keeping it stable lately, but longer term it's a dead end.
It turns out that this is fixable by writing a new stack. It's not as crazy as it sounds, a full-featured FireWire stack with a reasonable level of backwards compatibility is doable in less that 10k lines of code. I announced the first version of the stack back in December on LKML and we've been discussing the features and user space interfaces on the linux1394-devel list quite a bit. There's been a lot of great feedback and ideas from the Linux FireWire application developers out there, and people seem generally interested and positive. A storage-driver-only version of the stack is in the latest mm kernel and we're now shipping that patch in Fedora rawhide. Good times.
2 comments:
I am very much looking forward to a new Firewire stack for Linux. I was shocked when I tried to use some Firewire disks recently only to have errors all over the place. I hope the new stack works out better!
I thought about splitting up the blog, but the last time I did it, the result was underwhelming.
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