Comments on Mindready Sednet driver for QNX?

Hello

We are considering licensing Mindready’s Sednet low-level IEEE 1394 driver -
anyone have positives or negatives on the Sednet driver?

Thanks
Jens

Jens H Jorgensen wrote:

Hello

We are considering licensing Mindready’s Sednet low-level IEEE 1394 driver -
anyone have positives or negatives on the Sednet driver?

The LLA itself is reasonably solid; we only found two bugs at that level.
Support is good. Error handling is good. Safety is good; I’ve never
had the LLA crash QNX, even when debugging a driver. If your driver
exits while I/O is in progress, without closing the LLA, the memory
mapped to the controller board will not be released, which is a memory
leak. That’s the worst that happens.

Documentation is extensive,
but provides little insight. You’ll need a book like
“FireWire System Architecture” to understand the bus itself,
then the standards for whatever higher level protocols you have to implement.

Realize that the LLA doesn’t do very much. All it really does is
deal with the OHCI controller chip. You have to write several layers
on top of it to do anything. Elaborate logic is needed to deal with
bus resets before anything will work.

The LLA has a copy-protection/activation mechanism.
Each OHCI controller to be used must be separately authorized.
There’s a manual activation process which requires contacting
Mindready for each machine on which the LLA is to run, obtaining
a key file, and installing the key file.

I’ve successfully written a driver for OHCI cameras using
the Mindready LLA, and it works quite well.

John Nagle
Animats

Hello John - thanks for your input.

Documentation is extensive,
but provides little insight. You’ll need a book like
“FireWire System Architecture” to understand the bus itself,
then the standards for whatever higher level protocols you have to
implement.

Yes - I already ordered “FireWire System Architecture” by Don Anderson and
read most of it. The protocol that we need to implement is called UP3I
(www.up3i.org), and is documented through a specification. UP3I use IEEE
1394 at a very low level, which is why we are only looking at the LLA and
not the stack.

The LLA has a copy-protection/activation mechanism.
Each OHCI controller to be used must be separately authorized.
There’s a manual activation process which requires contacting
Mindready for each machine on which the LLA is to run, obtaining
a key file, and installing the key file.

I just learned about this and I understand what they are trying to do
(protect from unlicensed copies). I don’t approve of this approach because
if I as an employee of a company sold products based on unlicensed Sednet
drivers, our company would be faced with a huge
liability - which should be enough to deter any responsible employee from
selling unlicensed products.

I wish QSSL would include IEEE 1394 support in QNX! …Off to writing an
email to my QSSL account manager…


Jens

Does anyone know what ever happened to TRI’s FireStack?

I search on google for it, but there does not seem to be any information.


Jens

Jens H Jorgensen wrote:

Does anyone know what ever happened to TRI’s FireStack?

I search on google for it, but there does not seem to be any information.


Jens

Technology Rendezvous, Inc. of Santa Clara, CA, used to have
the web site “http://www.trinc.com”, but if you try that link,
you get “404 Not Found”.

John Nagle
Animats

Is the company still alive?

“John Nagle” <nagle@downside.com> wrote in message
news:b882ej$3kr$1@inn.qnx.com

Jens H Jorgensen wrote:
Does anyone know what ever happened to TRI’s FireStack?

I search on google for it, but there does not seem to be any
information.


Jens

Technology Rendezvous, Inc. of Santa Clara, CA, used to have
the web site "> http://www.trinc.com> ", but if you try that link,
you get “404 Not Found”.

John Nagle
Animats