It has been brought to our attention that FireWire users may be in for a nasty surprise, particularly, those who have yet to update their Arch Linux systems. Details are scarce as of this moment in writing, but a reporter [1] just came in with a story which should shed the most light [2].

OK, not really; it’s really simple. There are two kinds, or “stacks”, of FireWire subsystems in the kernel. One is old, and one is new. The old one is, well, an older stack, and is no longer provided. The new, well, is a more recent stack [3] with nicer module names which came with a recent kernel, which in turn was recently brought to us by Arch Linux [4]. FFADO was somewhat ready for this, but not completely (neither was Linux itself, maybe). Hence, this situation.

We do not think this warrants an update to our primary realtime kernel, since there is no such thing as 2.6.32-rt yet. However, you may like to know that the latest Linux comes with a new “make localmodconfig” which will definitely speed up your builds. If not, you may want to refrain from updating or roll back somehow.

On another note, you may have been expecting an update to the server-going-down article, so take this as one (although we brought things back up 2 weeks after that). The lack of an update can be attributed to the feeling of “incompleteness”, because we had a number of things in the TODO which we wanted to get done.

But never fear, we’re here – even when we’re not. So be good, be evil, and have a happy new year!

[1] http://forums.archaudio.org/topic/kernel-2632-firewire-and-jack-ffado-big-mess
[2] http://www.ffado.org/?q=node/1316
[3] http://ieee1394.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Juju_Migration
[4] http://www.archlinux.org/news/477/