Last week I found a spare FW card at work with a Texas Instruments chipset. I know that the SGI DVLink is a Texas Instruments too and I hoped that it might work with the DVLink 1.1 drivers. I plugged the card into my O2 at home and to my surprise the card was recognized by the kernel (it wasn't recognized by the DVLink driver but the 6.5.24 built-in firewire support as I later found out).

This is a picture of the actual card (its an Adaptec FireConnect 4300). The TI chip is labled: 38ECOET TSB43AB23 (I know that my mobile cam sucks big time - no need to tell me ). The card looks a bit different to those I have found on the net (using images.google.com) so I thought its better to show a picture of it here too.

And here is the walk-through of this sunday afternoon:

[waikiki]:~ $ hinv
CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 10.0
FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 10.0
1 300 MHZ IP32 Processor
Main memory size: 704 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
FLASH PROM version 4.18
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version ADAPTEC 7880
CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version ADAPTEC 7880
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 1
Integral SCSI controller 2: Version IEEE1394 SBP2
On-board serial ports: tty1
On-board serial ports: tty2
On-board EPP/ECP parallel port
CRM graphics installed
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: version A3 revision 0
Video: MVP unit 0 version 1.4
AV: AV1 Card version 1, Camera not connected.
Vice: TRE
DMediaPro DM10 FW option: unit 0, revision 1.1.0

.. connecting an external 80GB ide drive:

May 9 13:02:30 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 13:02:32 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 13:02:32 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 13:02:32 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 13:02:33 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 13:02:33 6A:waikiki unix: Firewire Node [1]: <6>Unknown, 1394 Storage

.. then the system created this device:

brw------- 1 root sys 0,149 May 9 13:05 /dev/dsk/1394/1ac910000064ac8/lun0vol/c2p0

.. a 1st try to mount the external storage (it was created on a mac):

# mount -t hfs /dev/rdsk/1394/1ac910000064ac8/lun0vol/c2p0 /mnt/
mount_hfs: can't mount myself: File name too long
mount: giving up on:
/mnt

.. ok.. there only were some 22GB of simpson .AVI on it - so lets format it:

# mkfs_xfs /dev/dsk/1394/1ac910000064ac8/lun0vol/c2p0 
meta-data=/dev/dsk/1394/1ac910000064ac8/lun0vol/c2p0 isize=256
agcount=19, agsize=1048576 blks
data = bsize=4096 blocks=19537686, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks, unwritten=1
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 mixed-case=Y
log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=2384
realtime =none extsz=65536 blocks=0, rtextents=0

.. uhhh.. it really worked now lets mount it:

# mount /dev/dsk/1394/1ac910000064ac8/lun0vol/c2p0 /mnt/

.. holy shit!

# df -k
Filesystem Type kbytes use avail %use Mounted on
/dev/root xfs 77934552 48092196 29842356 62 /
/dev/dsk/1394/1ac910000064ac8/lun0vol/c2p0 xfs 78141208 320 78140888 1 /mnt

.. now lets test the external drive for speed:

# diskperf -W -D -c2g /mnt/testfile

CRASH,BOOM,BANG

CRASH TIME: 1084101675 Sun May 9 13:21:15 2004
PANIC STRING: PANIC: pagedequeue: ph_count (0x80546558)

.. oh oh massive kernel panic with dump and all shit (downside of having 704MB main memory is the fucking time it takes to dump it

And thats how it looked:

.. finaly i attached my Apple powerbook to the firewire card:

May 9 14:25:04 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed 
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 14:25:04 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 14:25:04 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: Firewire Probe Failed
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: probe to controller /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 had 1 node(s) fail
May 9 14:25:04 1A:waikiki unix: ALERT: probe to controller /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 had 1 node(s) fail
May 9 14:25:06 6A:waikiki unix: Scanning firewire bus /hw/node/io/pci/3/ohci/0 (1 node)
May 9 14:25:06 6A:waikiki unix: Firewire Node [1]: <6>Apple Computer, Inc., Macintosh

.. I never managed it to mount the drive again or even format it seems like we have to wait till 6.5.3x