RE: netdevice problem - 1394 SPB-2 Drives

[Mark Knecht <mknecht@controlnet.com>]

Greg,
   To the best of my knowledge, there is no INT13 type support for any 1394
controller out there today. None of the add in cards that I have seen have
any BIOS extensions in ROM on them, so I would presume that the only
machines that might support booting would be machines that have 1394 built
into them, and there are precious few of those. (Sony, NEC, ...) I suppose
that someone like Adaptec, that has built combo SCSI/1394 cards in the past
would be a candidate for something like this, but I believe they exited the
1394 business when OHCI came along. (Maybe they'll come back!!!)

   To further complicate 1394, the drives are SPB-2 drives, and while I'm no
expert on this, there are a lot of things in SPB-2 that require a system to
essentially log into the drive before they use it. All of this is expensive
to put in system BIOS when there's no major user for it, so I don't think
we'll find it there either...

   I was interested the other day when someone made a comment about it being
a bad idea to hot plug your swap space, or something to that effect. Losing
important parts of the file system are a really bad idea, I suppose... ;-)
However, 1394 peripherals are emerging and I'd love to see them get some
real system support one of these days....

Just learning,
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg KH [mailto:greg@kroah.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001 10:20 AM
To: Mark Knecht
Cc: linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: netdevice problem - 1394 SPB-2 Drives


On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 10:03:18AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hi,
>    I'm a total 'lurker' here, but am involved on the hardware side with
the
> work going on with Linux-1394 support. 
> 
>    How do you guys seeing 1394 disk drives fitting into the hot-plug mix?
> The performance is much higher than USB, similar maybe to SCSI, but as of
> right now I do not believe that it will be possible to boot from a 1394
> drive, so the file system problems may not be a bad as SCSI.

I'm starting to experiment with booting a Linux install from a USB CDROM
drive, and look like I have things almost working.  But the biggest
problem (and one that you will probably have) is that you need BIOS
support to boot from the device.

Do any BIOSs support bootable 1394 devices, like hard drives?

If not, I don't think that it will ever work, but would be glad to be
proven wrong.

thanks,

greg k-h

-- 
greg@(kroah|wirex).com

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