Rumors about FFADO and the new firewire stack [Updated May 11th, 2010]

The last weeks have seen a few rumors and lots of questions: Is ffado running with the new firewire stack?

The answer is kind of yes.

What you need is libraw1394 in version 2.0.5 or higher. And kernel 2.6.32 or higher. Then ffado (both the 2.0 branch and development trunk) should be usable on the new juju stack. Thanks to the team of the kernel-stack and some distributions for stepping up and (mostly) fix the kernel and libraw1394 for this. The changes to ffado where quite minimal.

The other answer is still no.

Because ffado still uses libraw1394 as layer between the kernel and its own streaming-/configuration-stuff. Which adds some latency and a lot of uncertainties for the low-latency. There is work going on to implement in-kernel streaming but this is all to early for testing or announcement. And time is sparse…

The short answer as of this writing: No

Read on for the longer answer…

Running FFADO 2.0 or later on the new stack requires kernel 2.6.32 or later. And libraw1394 version 2.0.5 or later. Making ffado run on the new stack revealed some bugs and not-yet-implemented things in the new stack and the libraw1394 compatibility code because audio streaming is using the firewire stack in more demanding and advanced ways then for example hard-disk access.

But the good news is that this is actually worked on and working on the developers machines. Once all the necessary dependencies are released, its up to the distributions to ship the new versions (and finally completely disable the old stack).