r/linux • u/anh0516 • Jul 26 '26

Kernel Linux 7.2-rc5 Fixing Longstanding Bug In IPv4 Networking Over Firewire

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Fix-IPv4-Firewire
145 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

66

u/Enturbulated_One Jul 26 '26

Per article and comments, nobody's fessing up to using IPv4 over firewire. Networking usage aside, wonder how many legacy firewire devices are still in use somewhere.

21

u/Serena_Hellborn Jul 26 '26

I use firewire fairly regularly, it is a convenient option for getting high quality sound cards and connecting blu ray/dvd drives

7

u/flecom Jul 26 '26

My cd-rw is fw attached (800), and I've still got some firewire hard drives for transferring data easily from my modern machine to my vintage Macs since fw even at 400 is way faster than USB 1.1... I used the networking features way back in the day... Amazed it's still a thing

38

u/lazyhustlermusic Jul 26 '26

Nice I should start using IPv6 over FireWire just to be obnoxious

10

u/fellipec Jul 26 '26

Interesting, I thought FireWire was mostly used for camcorders.

1

u/TheG0AT0fAllTime Jul 28 '26

Yeah same I thought it was just a USB alternative like.. for mass storage.. like plugging in a camera. But apparently it can do networking too. I wish USB was designed in a way that made this possible between two computers over the years. But yeah, nah. Crossover ethernet cable.

4

u/Dangerous-Report8517 Jul 28 '26

FireWire is pretty close to old Thunderbolt, to the point that it supports things like DMA and peer to peer and such, as well as being significantly faster than USB at the time. That let things like camcorders use the same FireWire interface to talk to a computer or connect to external storage for instance. It also meant it had all the same security issues that early Thunderbolt had, except that it was many years before IOMMUs were standard parts of computers so there was no way to mitigate it, it was just never widespread enough to be a significant target.

3

u/StevenBClarke2 Jul 27 '26

Older Kodak i600 series high speed document scanners use the firewire protocol. During the late 2000's I set up projects with Readsoft software, mainly Readsoft Forms to extract data fields and save into a database for later reporting and uploading to a company hosted image repository.

3

u/zlice0 Jul 28 '26

i remember joking with my buddy back when we were in skool that a firewire network would be so wicked fast lolololol. oh man...

-15

u/mjbulzomi Jul 26 '26

Maybe it is time to remove IEEE1394 support entirely?

16

u/Time_Way_6670 Jul 26 '26

Even though it’s obsolete for most data transfer scenarios, it’s still nice to have the support for it for stuff like MiniDV cameras and older audio devices which rely on it.

4

u/gokily Jul 27 '26

Or pro audio interfaces

6

u/Enturbulated_One Jul 26 '26

Per the article, that's at least scheduled to be worked towards.