[CentOS] question on firewire support and centosplus

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Oct 2 18:43:31 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 10:05, Joe Landman wrote:
> Hi folks:
> 
>    Firewire was not supported in 4.0 due to the upstream provider not 
> including it.  Is it in 4.1?  Or is it still out of the mainline 
> upstream kernel provider?  What about centosplus?  Centosplus has been 
> listed as unsupported.  I presume this means that they are/were one-off 
> builds with missing functionality (e.g. xfs, etc), and are not updated. 
>   Is this the case?  I am looking at this for an important server, and I 
> want to make sure that if we switch to the centosplus kernel that we 
> haven't messed up the rest of the package support, or major kernel bugfixes.

The unsupported kernel just re-enables the things that are present
in fedora kernels (at least...) but were turned off in RHEL.  The
kernel is rebuilt on updates so you don't lose anything by using
it.

>    The reason I am curious about firewire is that I would like to use 
> the firewire interface rather than the USB interface for our backup 
> drives.   Its not much faster, just fewer context switches (e.g. lower 
> server load).

I'm using firewire on an FC3 box and am less than thrilled with the
stability.   The recent update to 2.6.13.x on FC4 looks promising
but I haven't tested enough to be sure.   Unless you have to
use firewire now, wait till you have at least a 2.6.13 kernel.
The box I'm using only has USB 1.0 ports so that's not a
reasonable alternative.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com





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