While IEEE-1394 Firewire hardware in the wild is increasingly rare, modern Linux IEEE-1394 subsystem maintainer Takashi Sakamoto has committed to maintaining Firewire support until 2029 . With the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel there are more incremental improvements to this code.

Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel version making the IEEE-1394/Firewire fixes all the more notable this cycle.

Most of the work submitted by Takashi Sakamoto who authored 42 patches for this kernel cycle are around code refactoring. Sakamoto noted in the pull request:

"- Removal of the deprecated debug parameter from firewire-ohci module
- Replacement of the module-local workqueue in 1394 OHCI PCI driver with
a companion IRQ thread
- Refactoring of bus management code
- Additional minor code cleanup

The existing tracepoints serve as an alternative to the removed debug parameter. The use of IRQ thread is experimental, as it handles 1394 OHCI SelfIDComplete event only. It may be replaced in the future releases with another approach; e.g. by providing workqueue from core functionality."

More details for those interested via the pull request .