Background

Back in 2007 a new cleaner and more maintainable firewire stack was incorporated into the Linux kernel (http://kerneltrap.org/node/8132). Both the old and new firewire stacks have been supported in the Ubuntu kernel since Jaunty , but with the new stack disabled and the old enabled. The new stack is slated to be complete and ready to fully replace the old, therefore we have switch the default in Maverick.

Purpose

To test the new Firewire stack for Maverick in as many ways and on as many different devices as possible to identify possible issues prior to the release. If you have firewire hardware please test that hardware with Maverick and report both success and failure as below.

Testing

The new firewire stack is enabled as the default in Maverick. The simplest way to test with Maverick is to download a live CD and boot that from either CD or a USB stick.

manual testing

Please manually test any existing firewire hardware you have, we are expecting your experience should be unchanged. You can also perform specific stress tests on those devices, for example:

• connect firewire disk and make sure you are able to transfer large amounts of data and the checksums are ok
• connect digital camera and make sure dvgrab and kino works

mythtv firewire tester

Myth TV has a firewire test tool that might come handy.

• install libraw1394-devel libiec61883-devel
• gcc -Wall -o firewire_tester firewire_tester.c -liec61883 -lraw1394

• you may need to add the following to the code #include <getopt.h>

reporting test results

Please report all testing to the ubuntu Kernel Team via our mailing list (Ubuntu Kernel Team <kernel-team@lists.ubuntu.com>). Please include [FIREWIRE CFT] Maverick: plus the hardware tested and success/failure in the email subject. For example:

• From: Andy Whitcroft <apw@canonical.com>
  To: Ubuntu Kernel Team <kernel-team@lists.ubuntu.com>
  Subject: [FIREWIRE CFT] Maverick: Dell 1537 success
  
  Tested several firewire devices on my Dell 1537 all behaved as expected.
  Devices tested:
  
    Disk: foobar 1.3
    Camera: wiggle 2.0
  
  -apw

Installation

Nothing needs to be installed to complete this testing. The bits needed are already available in the latest Maverick installs and ISO images.

Reporting issues

Should you encounter a bug during your testing, please file a new bug for the issue ensuring that you identify the bug as being related to this Call for Testing, include [FIREWIRE CFT] in the bug subject and tag the bug testing-firewire. It is also a good idea to ping the Kernel Triager(JFo) about the new bug. This is to ensure that issues do not get lost in other bugs.