Re:Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi
by MisterTea on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @06:12PM
(#47510217)
I always feel Apple made a real blunder with the FireWire licensing situation. FW was really interesting: It was a real memory mapped computer bus like PCI that also supported peer-to-peer operation. It was vastly superior to USB and had a lot of potential. That is, if you knew that Firewire was Apple's trademark, I.LINK was Sony's, Lynx was Texas Instruments, and generic IEEE-1394/1394 labels everyone non-technical was supposed to somehow understand. Great tech hamstrung by greed.
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Then again, remote DMA to your memory via a port on the computer, while a great tool for debugging internal stuff, is also quite the wide door to getting hacked if someone every manages to plug in a malicious device in the same port.
Re:Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi
by geerlingguy on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @10:45AM
(#47518019)
It's funny how we've come back around to this, with the M3 Mac Studios allowing you to enable RDMA over Thunderbolt. You have to toggle the setting via a firmware change, but it's there for performance!
FireWire was pretty wild in its day. It just got hampered by the per-port licensing fee, and once USB 2.0 rolled out, its days were numbered for anyone not needing the latency/power features.