Firewire blues

[Gerald Heinig]

Stephan Uphoff wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 04:16, Gerald Heinig wrote:
> 
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I'm having problems getting two 5.3-RELEASE boxes to communicate over 
>>firewire.
>>I'm using two VIA Vt-6306 -based cards which are correctly recognised at 
>>boot-time.
>>
>>I've loaded the dcons and dconschat modules and obtained both firewire 
>>addresses via fwcontrol.
> 
> 
> I assume you mean dcons_crom module instead of dconschat.

Yes, sorry, my mistake.

> 
> Did you reset the firewire bus?

I did reset it, but only on the debugging system, not on the target system.

> 
> DCONS_CROM(4):
> 	.....
> 	BUGS
>      If you load dcons_crom.ko manually after booted, you may have to
> initiate
>      a bus reset by ``fwcontrol -r'' to update Configuration ROM.
> 
> 
> 
>>When I try to set up a connection with dconschat I get
>>
>>[dcons disconnected (get crom failed)]
>>
>>The exact command I gave is:
>>
>>dconschat -br -G 5556 -t <the remote firewire address>
>>
>>I also tried setting the control ROM address with the -a option, to no 
>>avail.
>>
>>Anyone have any ideas as to where I'm going wrong?
>>
>>BTW, I'm trying to set up remote debugging with gdb to debug a kernel hang.
> 
> 
> I recall some issues with gdb and firewire as a module that may or may
> not be fixed.
> I recommend to put the dcons into the kernel to avoid any problems.

I tried that too. There are a few additional flags that can be set. Of 
particular interest are DCONS_FORCE_CONSOLE and DCONS_FORCE_GDB. I 
presume I should set FORCE_CONSOLE to 1 if I want a console over 
firewire, am I right?
I'll take a look and see if there are any bugfixes for firewire.

Thanks for the reply!

Cheers,
Gerald