*Still* no plans for firewire (ieee1394) support?

[Russtopia]

I'm posting again since I've been using virtualBox for a year now, with great results. Love the product.

However, it appears that the virtualbox team still has no plans for firewire virtualization. I find this disappointing, and I'm not the only one -- just search for 'firewire' and 'ieee1394' on these forums and it's evident other people can find a use for this.

Someone on the virtualbox team needs to realize that firewire is not a 'dead bus', and is HUGE in the music and video production business. Digital mixers, videocams, professional audio interfaces, all use ieee1394.

VirtualBox could really stand out from the other guys by being the first to support ieee1394 in a guest OS.

Please seriously consider it, guys! Musicians everywhere would love this!

[kebabbert]

When dabbling professionally with music, having low latency is very important. With virtual firewire, wouldnt it introduce some additional latency making it useless for professional music work?

[Russtopia]

Sure it would add a bit of latency, but if it were a *constant* latency, it wouldn't be insurmountable. Windows natively still has to deal with latency; musicians must always do tests and adjust the latency compensation settings within the audio apps to adjust for this. This would be no different.

[spaaarky21]

When dabbling professionally with music, having low latency is very important. With virtual firewire, wouldnt it introduce some additional latency making it useless for professional music work?

Music is just one use for FireWire. The other major use is (of course) video, which is why I would like to see FireWire support in VirtualBox.

[McStarfighter]

I full agree for this feature implentation ...

[Martin]

I think with firewire support it is the same as with parallel port support. The commercial customers don't ask and pay for it (enough), so the developers don't actively work on it. To get it implemented, someone in the opensource community would need to develop and contribute it.

[sej7278]

i don't really see the point of firewire support. just rip the video files on the host, then use them on the guest, or if its just a drive, then nfs mount it from the guest.

bit like dvd burning - i'd never do that in a guest, what's the point? most of the time i don't even use my dvd drive for reading, i mount an iso or something.

i don't really see a huge amount of use for usb or serial; and parallel is as dead as dead can be, even for dongles most vendors have switched to usb hasps.

[drongo]

My primary use of VirtualBox is to support my legacy hardware with no (or inadequate) drivers on my host OS (Linux).

My Canon printer works fine for most things using CUPS, but I can not print on CD/DVD media under Linux. My Canon scanner is old, and completely unsupported in Linux (and 64 bit versions of Windows for that matter). Both of these devices perform flawlessly under VirtualBox.

My firewire based Panasonic DV camera is a few years old now, and even though I can control playback/rewind/ff etc. capture fails utterly. It never even looks like it might work.

From my point of view ieee1394 support in VirtualBox would certainly be welcome.

[fredsol]

I also wished there were firewire on virtual box (host: mac, guest: win xp), so that I could use my DV camcoder on my virtualized XP.

[twistedlincoln]

I'll add my "me too" to the list of users wanting this feature. Even if it was only in the non-OSE version (like USB), Firewire support would be great to have for video capture work.

[marosdan]

Hallo,
I and my friends musician must have 2nd PC (!) with Windows for external HDD recording M-Audio FireWire 1814 - super hardware, but planning never drivers for penguin (Grrrrrrrrrrr.............) (no dualboot for me, I will not stopping services my Debian).
Very nice new Year from Czech.
Maros

[teotwawki]

I have stumbled upon a couple of other FOSS projects which may provide useful ground-work for Firewire support in VirtualBox.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/usbip/
Does USB over IP and is works fine in many VM situations - even for hardware security dongles apparently.
E.g. A physical USB port on a server machine connects to a software driver / agent in the guest within a VM ware ESX environment.

http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/DVTS/intro.html
Does Firewire over IP back to Firewire - using RTP to maintain the isosynchronous data stream.
E.g. A DV camera connects to a physical Firewire port on machine 'A'. A DV tape deck connects to the physical Firewire port on machine 'B'. Both are networked.

Although neither of these directly suit our needs here, with the cooperation of these projects, there should be a decent amount of reusable code to make Firewire support in VirtualBox almost as simple as adding the front-end of DVTS to the back-end of USB/IP.

Unfortunately it's way beyond me but I'd be happy to assist with the testing.

[mpack]

I have stumbled upon a couple of other FOSS projects which may provide useful ground-work for Firewire support in VirtualBox.

You should be wary of lumping all FOSS projects together, in particular the GPL license (a la your first link) has licensing terms which may make it impractical to use that code in a commercial product, which VirtualBox is.

[teotwawki]

VirtualBox may be available commercially (as well as freely) but it's also GPL v2: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/GPL
However, I couldn't find a licence declaration for the DVTS project (probably the same as FreeBSD though).

I'm no lawyer so I don't know the intricacies of mixing code from different licences (I doubt anyone truly groks it) but I would assume that regular code contributors would know to apply their usual diligence regarding licenses, copyrights, patents etc.

If there were some useful code under an incompatible license, you could still ask the author nicely.
And even if the original author didn't want to port the existing code, some of the project contributors may be willing to share their experience to aiding new code. Collaborating with other project teams is as much about sharing knowledge as it is actual code.

Anyway, if implemented like USB/IP then it wouldn't need to touch VirtualBox code to run inside a guest and it would still solve the lack of Firewire. I have posted the same suggestion in all 3 projects partly out of courtesy but mostly because the people who could write this are likely to already be within these projects.

[VolkerAlois]

Since i follow this discussion quite a long time: Just my opinion :

Virtualized systems based on OpenSource - OS/Applicaitonsoftware offer huge benefits to commercial users as well as for the privat consumer market.... in the future. So from my point of view (and i think also from the Oracel / Sun a.s.o. Product Managers point of view) today for virtualization there seems to be a clear focus on commercial usage. Feature requests by private - noncommerical - users only play a minor role. The money makes the world go round.. and money with virtualization is only made with commercial business models. But...

I also think, that there is a huge potential in the non commercial market to make money with virtualbox. But therefore the user has to be convinced to use a virtualized system. So to come back to such minor priority requests like Firewire support, Audio - CD support .. and other multimedia gimmicks.... these are decision making features in the consumer market. As long as virtualized Systems do not offer a comparable multimedia support like "the" commercial operating system of MS, users will not switch to virtualized open source systems.

So from a multimedia loving noncommerical users point of view.. i do definitly support a change request for support of Firewire (maybe this will get obsolete with new high speed interfaces coming up in the near future, but up to now.. you could make lots of people happy)

From a commercial point of view: Forget about it... no company is interested in the Firewire - SchnickSchnack, as well as audio CD playback.. and other entertainment stuff. We all know, there are other more important features needed.

For the future: I think there is only a - "relatively" - small step for virtualization and OpenSource to have success in the consumer market. Most of the required features are already build into the really amazing Virtuabox - System. I hope Mr. Sunny Oracle knows about that.

Regards

Volker