[hamei]

It really beats me that they didn't have reliable "easy" USB mass storage capability in IRIX in 2006!!!!!!!????? (IRIX 6.5.30)

This would have been very useful, as my tezro has a USB card fitted, featuring two USB controllers and four ports!

At the time, USB was slower than horse snot in December .... firewire was (and is) much better, so I didn't mind their choosing the better interface.

However, it would have been a lot more reassuring if they'd made the usb keyboard and mouse reliable. And the Wacom tablets, which were sort of a staple for Irix. Probably too much to ask to get usb spaceballs ... after all, those are only used for 3d graphics. Oh wait ....

If the firewire worked properly, that would have been nice, too.

To be honest, at this time they weren't making doody-squat that actually worked right. If you ever happen to see Rick Belluzzo while you are driving that chopper around, you have my permission to run him down like a rabid dog.

[Raion]

Well Chulofiasco, I certainly empathize with the want to patch the drivers, but it's not that simple:

We don't have the source for the firewire stack, so we have to basically reverse engineer the driver to make it work. You mentioned hex editing, but you may need to go a step further to actually solve this:

I would objdump the object or archive file containing the driver to ensure that we have the lowest common denominator, and then we would either have to trawl the assembly code (a nontrivial task) or try to decompile the object files to understand how the driver works.

I suspect there's probably either a check somewhere for what kernels the driver works on or a particular incompatibility with how the kernel is built for the O2 or Octane. I can dump the symbol tables from an object file using nm, but I'm not very good at doing anything beyond that.

Another thing would be if the mlquery binary has debug symbols, you can try running it from dbx, setting breakpoints and figuring out where it's failing to find the device. par could also be useful. I kind of wish we had lsof on IRIX, there are times when listing the file descriptors of an active process could be useful for tracking down how it's working

[hamei]

The purpose of building the utilities like ....

I was more thinking of another site that's all gung-ho on creating an entirely new development setup so that all those budding programmers out there could leap in and produce dozens of great open source applications.

Pardon my cynicism but that seems real unlikely. I bet most people using SGI boxes would much rather have, for example, a usb mass storage driver. Or something for a webcam. Something we could use.  Even getting the existing firewire driver to work correctly with an iSight would be a lot more useful than what they are doing.

I don't mean to say they shouldn't do whatever they want but honestly, that stuff is nore of an ego trip than anything useful.

[jwhat]

aaaaannnnd... we’re back with more FireWire woes.

Being trapped in the house with the batflu pandemic has finally given me time to play with some of my gear.

i installed a 300gb 15k drive into the Octane, and installed  fresh copy of irix 6.5.30.  With the Pesudo-DM10 (Adaptec Red) the system showed the DM10 in the hinv listing.  fwprobe etc were NOT installed by default.  Installed the beta driver package, which provided the fw tools.

After a restart, the operating system scrolled some fwbus probing nonsense continuously and finally stumbled upon the connected Apple iSight camera.

fwprobe etc all fail to communicate with the bus.  when the octane powers up, the camera also powers up, but by the time we reach irix login, the camera is no longer powered up.

there is now an IIDC device in the hinv, and a camera icon on the desktop, however when running mlquery, there are no devices listed.

per the thread above, I’m guessing we now need to modify a binary or two, as I’m missing a /hw/firewire key that I’m betting this thing is looking towards to find the hardware.  

Most of this is beyond me, but I’ve gotten a lot farther this time than I did when playing with this guy and my O2.

Some marked up photos are included, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I installed both fw_ghex & fw_hexedit and had a look at various backup and installed versions of /usr/lib32/libfw.so.1

Here is what I found:

The string within the binary that was edited is:

/hw/firewire/0/glue/glue0

which was edited to:

/fw/firewire/0/glue/glue0

(there are 3 occurrences and you only need to change /hw to /fw)

The next step is to find where your DM10 is.

On my Octane this is:

/hw/node/xtalk/13/pci/2/ohci/0/glue/glue0

So now create the following directory structure

/fw/firewire/0/glue and put symbolic link to the above, ie:

cd /fw/firewire/0/glue

ln -s /hw/node/xtalk/13/pci/2/ohci/0/glue/glue0 glue0

Now reboot and do fwprobe:

# fwprobe
Probing DM10 cards...
Number of cards: 1
Card Info
=========
Card #: 0
Name  : DM10
ID    : 0x0
Ports : 3
Speed : 400 / 400

1 devices attached
Device 0: 0x0
  Vendor: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
   Model: DMediaPro DM10
   Proto: HBA


In testing I plugged in Apple iSight Firewire Camera and Firewire DVD Drive.

The DVD drive is able to read IRIX CD even without the fix above, but I am still testing with the Camera.

Cheers,


Zebity.

[jwhat]

Hi Chulofiasco & others,

here is update on Adaptec FireConnect 4300 AFW-4300B Rev 1.1 (Red PCB with Texas Instruments Chip).

When I have this in Octane with IRIX 6.5.30 with FireWire SW 1.1.
It reports as DM10 and IEEE1934 SCSI Controller.
I can get CD-ROM to connect but cannot get Apple iSight (IIDC) camera to work.
fwprobe does not work unless you do the FW/HW filesystem soft links and binary image hacking that I described in prior post.

I have now also tested with Fuel with IRIX 6.5.30 with FireWire SW 1.1.
It reports as DM10 and IEEE1394 SCSI Controller
fwprobe & mlquery work without any hacking of FW/HW Filesystems and binary image hacking.

So my summary is: DM10 does not and will likely never work fully on Octane unless someone writes a new driver.

Fuel (and hence Tezro and O350) should all work without any additional hacking around.

I have now once more removed the Adaptec 4300/DM10 from my Octane and will never put it back in again ... to much work for to little successful results 

Cheers from Oz,


John.

[indigofan]

I couldn't get a firewire drive to work period on my Fuel, got all kinds of disk errors and have two drives that have been listed as "supported". Will pull the card and throw it in a PC coming for a MAME machine. At least I'll get some use of the card.