IEEE 1394 (FireWire) Testing?

Cadre asks: "Can a regular COTS FireWire card be used for monitoring data (kind of like a regular COTS ethernet card can be put into promiscuous mode and the data can be monitored with libpcap)? I work for an organization that does a lot of databus monitoring and hardware-in-the-loop testing of large systems. Firewire has become popular (Ethernet too, but we've solved that problem with libpcap) and we're looking for a solution to monitor and simulate data. There are a couple manufactures that sell specialized equipment for FireWire testing that include onboard FPGAs but they seem more geared towards testing the FireWire bus than testing the overall systems on the bus."

Comments

Study the spec, then look at the chipsets.

[stienman]

It's been awhile since I've studied firewire, but as far as I recall it's a relatively simple packet based protocol.

I don't see why a common firewire card couldn't be used to snoop on the traffic on a bus. Because of the way endpoints and bus controllers are determined, and how data flows you may have to be careful about the placement of the snooping computer on the bus.

The real trick is getting the chipset datasheet from the manufacturer.

Good luck!

-Adam

Hm

[PunkOfLinux]

Something you might want to look into is finding (or writing) a way to grab every bit that passes through the firewire port. I remember once i found a way to split the output from /dev/hda to go to both it's intended location along with /dev/dsp. Interesting result, and doing something similar might be useful for you.