From wiki.network-crawler.de

Contents 1 Abstract 2 Topology 3 Physical medium 4 Transfer modes 4.1 isochronous 4.2 asynchronous 5 Firewire with Linux

Abstract

• High performance serial bus for connecting heterogeneous Devices
• Targeted for consumerelectronic applications (e.g. high-speed video transmission)
• Also usable for communication in industrial applications (e.g. distributed control systems)

Topology

• The bus topology of FireWire is tree-like, i.e. non-cyclic network with branch and leaf nodes

Physical medium

• 1394a specification: data transmission up to 400 Mbps
• 1394b specification: data transmission up to 3.2 Gbps

Transfer modes

isochronous

• Targets one or more nodes by being associated with a multicasting channel number
• maximally 64 channels in total
• Dont re-transmit lost or corrupted packets, but delivers data at constant rate
• well suited for the time-triggered state message transmission in distributed control systems

asynchronous

• The whole network on FireWire appears as a large 64-bits mapped bus address space
• Each node occupying a 48-bits mapped space
• The higher 16 bits are used to identify nodes
• Asynchronous transaction is split into 2 sub-transactions:

-> a request to access a piece of address on another node
-> response

• Coordination between request and response is ascertained by the Transaction Layer protocol
• Targeted for non-error-tolerant applications, like command and control message transmission in distributed control system.

Firewire with Linux

To load the modules you have to insert some modules:

insmod ieee1394 
insmod ohci1394
insmod raw1394

Experiments with Ethernet an Firewire

modprobe eth1394

ifconfig ethX up

where X is the device eth1394 tells you