FireWire and Firewire page combined

Introduction

FireWire or IEEE1394 was developed in 80s and 90s by Apple to provide high-speed communications.

FireWire is available as wireless, fiber optic and coaxial versions, all using the same protocol. The technology is a peer-to-peer standard, that means that every connected device can be a host or client. Firewire can connect up to 63 devices.

Features of FireWire

• Peer-to-Peer networking allowing up to 63 devices to be connected per bus
  • non-cyclic network
    • automatic address selection
    • no terminators needed in opposition of SCSI
    • locations are random
• Half-duplex 98.304 Mbps 1394a supports 2x (196.608) and 4× (393.216)
  • 1394b provides full duplex 98.304 Mbps on 1x 2x 4x 8x 16x 32x
• Data encoding

  • 1394b uses improvement of FibreChannel's 8b10b encoding

• Support for Direct Memory Access (DMA)
• Data-Strobe encoding providing less jitter than normal clock-data
• Like USB, backwards compatible
• Isochronous which means that between cycles are equal time intervals

Advantages of FireWire

• hot pluggable (support by udev)
• outstanding performance
  • True data rates where USB normally only provides half the theoretical rate
  • direct map to processor

  • Direct Memory Access for FireWire equipment

Applications

Ethernet over FireWire

FireWire can be used to provide an Ethernet connection between two or more computers (peer-to-peer networking). RFC article 2734 and 3146 describe how to use IPv4 and IPv6 through this all-around technology. How to do this on Ubuntu and Debian can be found here

Digital Video

You might know DV, it is a protocol used by quite a lot camcorders (from a few years back). A DV device works at 100 Mbps, so there might be a problem when a faster Firewire is daisy chained