[RFC] Maverick - switch to new firewire stack. (fwd)

[Manoj Iyer]

fwding ubuntu-devel for comments/action from foundations team.


Cheers
--- manjo

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 13:44:53 -0500 (CDT)
From: Manoj Iyer <manoj.iyer at canonical.com>
To: Ubuntu Kernel Team <kernel-team at lists.ubuntu.com>
Subject: [RFC] Maverick - switch to new firewire stack.


During Lucid beta cycle we noticed that certain fire-wire drives don't mount. I 
did some investigation and I proposed that we switch from the old stack to the 
new stack in a blueprint:

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/kernel-maverick-firewire-stack

* upstream recommends that distros should switch to the new stack, all new bug 
fixes, security fixes, and features will be in the new stack. Here is a link to 
bugzilla where known issues with the old driver are recorded but wont be fixed. 
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10046 . Wiki page on kernel.org 
says that there are some fundamental design & security issues with the old 
stack and that prompted the re-write of the stack.

* as per the proposed blueprint, the old drivers will be blacklisted and new 
drivers will be white-listed, this will be done as a fall back for users who 
experience issues migrating to the new drivers. Kernel config options are 
enabled already to build both old and new stack.

* as per the new fire-wire stack migration guide ( juju migration guide ), user 
space libraries should already work with the new drivers. We need help from 
foundations team to
  1. verify that the libraries listed in the migration guide, libraw1394 and 
libdc1394, are installed are of the correct latest version. As per 
documentation the core libraries were already compatible back in 2008.
  2. modify udev rules to give /dev/fw* user access privilege, so that groups 
like video can read /dev/fw* as non root. As per the migration guide, rules 
have been merged into /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules of udev v144.
  3. blacklist ohci1394 sbp2 eth1394 dv1394 raw1394 video1394 and whitelist 
firewire-ohci firewire-sbp2 firewire-core firewire-net in 
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf. As far as I can see this is the only 
real change that needs to happen to make this switch.

* it will be desirable to make this switch before alpha1 and get it tested by 
community and also develop some tests targeted at firwire and include them in 
the kernel-qa suite. Kernel bug triage will issue a call for testing & track 
bugs against the new stack.

thoughts ?

Cheers
--- manjo