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How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

arstechnica.com

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Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#31

Post by LeifCarrotson »

jancsika wrote: post #28
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's being compared to something like 12 Mbps USB 1.1: Firewire is just so much faster that it doesn't matter. I deal with upgrading a lot of industrial electronics, and have to answer this question frequently: people are concerned about replacing Modbus RTU and similar setups with modern protocols: "But it's not real time!", "It's too high-level!" "Consumer or office network gear can't possibly work here!" N…

I'm not sure I understand. Are you replacing hardware for clients who think they need low-latency realtime delivery of data, or for clients who actually need to hit low-latency delivery deadlines? From the article: > And FireWire had its own micro-controller, so it was unaffected by fluctuations in CPU load. This is still an important distinction for, say, an USB soundcard vs. a Firewire soundcard.

They need to get data in like... 3 seconds... So the operators can shut the machine down if something goes wrong.

But now the machine has much more intelligence, so it shuts itself off quicker. And where they needed to check the "low latency" and "realtime" boxes in the 90s to get adequate performance, now any bus (like Ethernet, or you can stick Ethercat or Powerlink on top if you need realtime) is so much faster that it doesn't matter.

It's like someone saying they need their Enterprise-grade 15k RPM SCSI drives in their server...when they just need an ordinary consumer SATAIII SSD.

Economies of scale are huge in tech. Stuff that reaches billions of people is often more performant than specialized gear.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#32

Post by jancsika »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #26
jancsika wrote: post #13

> Speeds across networks of all sizes are now so high that there's also little need for something like FireWire. "The packets can arrive way before it's needed, because it's so fast," Sirkin noted. "So you don't need to worry about being synchronous any more." For use cases where reliable low-latency transport is required (i.e., Firewire's main strength), what could possibly be meant by "packets arrive way before it'…

At least on Linux, you can easily be barraged by tons of IRQs from your FireWire device. Every time some data comes in from your device (let's say some music production platform) it's going to DMA that data right on over via a PCI lane or 4 then fire off an interrupt to inform your OS "hey hey got some new information for ya!". Now imagine the platform was poorly designed so it fires off that IRQ once for each track.…

This is really interesting.

When you say "platform", are you talking about the Firewire device driver?

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#33

Post by zkms »

walterbell wrote: post #27
zkms wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offering DMA to devices can be good actually if you care about performance, and the security issues can be eliminated with a properly set up IOMMU in the mix.

Can IOMMU securely differentiate between devices on an external bus, such that a hostile device [1] cannot spoof a non-hostile device? [1] https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech

https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2017/SSTIC-actes/protip/SST... answers your question.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#35

Post by Eric_WVGG »

Gracana wrote: post #30
jjguy wrote: post #22

> After being informed of IBM's hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue, CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire's licensing policy. Apple would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that's $2 per unit.)...Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWi…

What is your interpretation of the "fail fast" mindset? This sounds like the perfect example of a big project failing catastrophically that "fail fast" intends to avoid.

He's talking about "fail fast" failing to rescue Firewire, not Apple.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#37

Post by pmarreck »

walterbell wrote: post #25
jsjohnst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbolt 3, DisplayPort, USB 1.1-3.1, FireWire, HDMI, MHL, analog audio, power delivery

FireWire? That would have been a good addition to the article. Hopefully that will allow older FireWire devices to be used with a USB-C-to-Firewire adapter.

A cursory google search did not reveal any USB-C to FireWire adapters; there are Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapters (Thunderbolt 3 is basically USB-C version of Thunderbolt 2 which is Mini DisplayPort) and there are Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire adapters, so that combo may work

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#38

Post by NSAID »

dcosson wrote: post #19

One major thing not mentioned is that apprently not everyone bothered implementing FireWire the same. I never learned the technical reason, but if you bought certain digital audio recording interfaces circa 2007, you learned in the fine print/after you called customer service that it only worked with TI FireWire ports . These were the ones used on Macs at this point, I had a dell laptop which used a cheaper manufactu…

Wow, I had forgotten about that. I never understood what the cause of this issue was either, but it sure took up a lot of my time.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#39

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Gracana wrote: post #30
jjguy wrote: post #22

> After being informed of IBM's hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue, CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire's licensing policy. Apple would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that's $2 per unit.)...Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWi…

What is your interpretation of the "fail fast" mindset? This sounds like the perfect example of a big project failing catastrophically that "fail fast" intends to avoid.

On the contrary, OP is saying that Apple made the decision to bump the license fee up to a dollar, very quickly saw that it was too high and lowered it to 25 cents, but it didn't matter. That one simple failed decision that Apple quickly reversed still ended up killing FireWire.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#40

Post by kitsunesoba »

It really is a shame that FireWire didn't work out. Aside from the far better transfer speeds, when used for external storage FireWire has always been more solid. USB storage has a nasty habit of periodically flickering out for a split second and has generally been more flaky, something that's actually gotten worse with USB 3 — if you haven't run into this set of issues yourself, do a quick Google and you'll find mountains of posts from people having major issues with USB 3 where 2 works great.

Naturally this extra speed and solidness made for a better experience when booting from external media. One my favorite features of my 4th gen 20GB iPod was the ability to keep an OS X partition on it that I could boot from via FireWire. It worked great — well enough to get work done with, even on low power machines like 400Mhz G3 iMacs — and it saved me several times.

Also, I always loved that little click when plugging in FW400 connectors (can't remember if 800 had this feature). That little bit of tactile confirmation that you've plugged your device in properly is something I wish USB had.

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