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73416ba
(Get the code!)
Yes, there would be some benefits to provide the new drivers as an opt-in alternative, i.e. enabled in the build configuration but blacklisted to prevent automatic loading:
- Asynchronous performance of 1394a buses (a.k.a. FireWire 400) is indeed considerably higher in the new firewire drivers.
- They are more secure due to physical DMA filtering and possibly finer-grained character device file permissions.
- Having the new drivers may help when trying to debug issues with FireWire devices.
- Upstream development activities are focused on the new drivers.
- Advanced users of pro/ semi-pro FireWire applications may be interested to try the new drivers.
However,the new drivers are of lesser usefulness on distributions which still provide libraw1394 v1 instead of v2. SBP-2 (storage) devices would indeed be the only device class that can be accessed through the new drivers without libraw1394 v2 and libdc1394 v2.