Linux Could Experience Unexpected System Reboots When Pairing AMD Ryzen With Firewire

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Could Experience Unexpected System Reboots When Pairing AMD Ryzen With Firewire

In the land of odd hardware bugs and interesting Linux kernel behavior, a fix was merged today for Linux 6.7 and to be back-ported to existing stable kernel series for dealing with a situation where unexpected system reboots could happen primarily on AMD Ryzen systems when using Firewire (IEEE-1394)...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-Firefox-Linux-Fix

[zexelon]

Thankfully this will only affect the last two or three people using firewire

Random question, is firewire still used in any major capacity?

[ojsl1]

Well, I'm glad I've somehow dodged this even though I've been using Zen+ and Zen3 processors with a firewire audio interface for multiple years now (though probably related to me having nomce always enabled).

[CommunityMember]

Random question, is firewire still used in any major capacity?

There was still (out in the wild) a number of A/V devices that use firewire. Most of the vendors have newer versions (upgraded to a newer interconnect), but there are people/orgs with those devices that do not want to upgrade (or have limited funds so choose to pick up an older/cheaper device). I suspect many of those users are running macOS/Windows, but there are always a few special people on Linux.

[mdedetrich]

AMD ryzen is literally on fire.

Please murder me now

[mdedetrich]

Random question, is firewire still used in any major capacity?

Firewire was THE thing back in its day and there is quite a lot of equipment particularly camera's which were built with firewire in mind that is used quite a lot (I know this because I have quite a few friends in the creative industry as indie's and they use these camera's because they are quite inexpensive).

Granted in most cases these people are using converters from firewire to displayport/usb with mac's, so the usecase of using firewire on Linux is probably lower (it might have been higher back in the day when Linux was being used as ingesting machines for large scale use but I would imagine in such use cases the companies would have updated their equipment by now)

[PluMGMK]

From the sound of the message and the look of the code, the patch contains a workaround, rather than a fix. The actual root cause seems to be unknown, although at least they've tracked down the exact combination of hardware that is affected. Very intriguing…

[sophisticles]

From the sound of the message and the look of the code, the patch contains a workaround, rather than a fix. The actual root cause seems to be unknown, although at least they've tracked down the exact combination of hardware that is affected. Very intriguing…

This commit suppresses the unexpected system reboot in the combination of hardware. It avoids the access itself. As a result, the software stack can not provide the hardware time anymore to unit drivers, userspace applications, and nodes in the same IEEE 1394 bus. It brings apparent disadvantage since time-aware application programs require it, while time-unaware applications are available again; e.g. sbp2."

It says as much in the release, they disabled needed functionality because it can't be fixed.

In all honesty, if you're using an AMD and Linux for this type of work, you are getting what you deserve.

If you need to do this professionally buy Intel and run Windows or buy a Mac, if you're not going to make any money from it you can use a Ryzen and Linux.

[Old Nobody]

From the sound of the message and the look of the code, the patch contains a workaround, rather than a fix. The actual root cause seems to be unknown, although at least they've tracked down the exact combination of hardware that is affected. Very intriguing…

The combination of hardware is rather unusual, too: The named VIA chips are for PCI bus. For PCIe it's the VIA VT6315, which is not mentioned in the patch.

[willmore]

Oh, no! How ever will I use my, uhhh, iSight 640x480p60 firewire camera with my modern desktop? Start with, how will I even plug in my PCI Firewire card into a PCI-E only system. Is someone making a card with a FW chip and the PCI to PCI-E bridge on it or is there a modern AMD motherboard with one of the effected PCI-E to PCI bridges on it?

I'm not even sure how far back in my motherboard pile I'd have to go to even find a PCI slot. Core2 era, maybe? I'd love to hear from someone still using FW for reasons other than nostalga.