Excellent job on the firewire support!

[Andrew Gallatin]

Doug Rabson writes:
 > On Sunday 18 July 2004 18:51, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
 > > Hi,
 > >
 > > I just wanted to say that I used FreeBSD's firewire and sbp-II
 > > support for the first time this weekend.  It seems to be fast (over
 > > 26MB/sec writes, 34MB/sec reads to a LaCie 160GB drive), and robust. 
 > > It works well on non-i386 platforms -- I'm using it to back up an
 > > amd64, and to serve as a root device for a FreeBSD/powerpc  machine.
 > >
 > > All in all, it totally exceeded my expectations.  Thank you very
 > > much|
 > 
 > Wait till you try debugging using gdb over firewire with dcons. An all 
 > round positive experience :-)


It would be nice to remove my Comtrol Rocketport serial card, and the
8 serial cables leading across the middle of the room to my shelf of
machines and replace it with one firewire cable leading to a firewire hub.
But, as a firewire newbie, I have some questions:

1) Is any firewire PCI adapter just as good as any other in terms of
   performance, and FreeBSD support? (prices seem to range from $10 to
   $100)

2) Is dcons usable after a panic (ie, DDB or KDB_TRACE)?  Or is it
   only usable for remote-gdb?

3) Is dcons endian and pointer-size agonstic?  Can I run consoles to
   an amd64 and a powerpc box from an x86?

4) Does the loader know about dcons?  Eg, can I do "unload <ret> boot
   kernel.test" using dcons?

Thanks,
Drew