FWE(4)

✨ FWE(4) — Ethernet emulation driver for FireWire ✨

okay bestie, buckle up, this is the fwe page from the Kernel Interfaces Manual and it's giving niche-but-iconic 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

fwe — Ethernet emulation driver for FireWire 🦋

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

so like, there are two ways to get this driver into your life. option one: bake it right into the kernel. drop these lines in your kernel configuration file:

device firewire
device fwe

orrrr, if you're more of a load-it-later kind of girl, you can load the driver as a module at boot time instead — just put this line in loader.conf(5):

if_fwe_load="YES"

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

the fwe driver provides non-standard Ethernet emulation over FireWire (IEEE 1394). yes, that FireWire. the one from 2005. she's vintage, she's serving 💅

heads up tho: firewire(4) and fwohci(4) must also be configured in the kernel as well, or this whole thing does not work. it's a trio, not a solo act 🫶

so how does she do it? this driver exploits asynchronous stream over IEEE 1394 to carry Ethernet frames. and if you wanna pick which stream channel she uses, that's specified by the hw.firewire.fwe.stream_ch sysctl(8). cute, right? 🎀

also, this driver supports polling(4) as well, if it is compiled with the DEVICE_POLLING option. bestie loves options ✨

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

arp(4), firewire(4), fwip(4), fwohci(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), polling(4), ifconfig(8), kldload(8), sysctl(8)

like the whole friend group honestly 🌸

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🕰️ HISTORY 🕰️

the fwe device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.0. an elder. a legend. a pioneer 🫡

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🧚 AUTHORS 🧚

the fwe driver and this manual page were written by Hidetoshi Shimokawa. king behavior, fr fr 👑

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💀 BUGS 💀

okay so listen, this is the part where we're honest:

• this driver emulates Ethernet in a very adhoc way, and it does not reserve a stream channel using an isochronous manager. it's vibes-based networking, no cap 😭
• also note that this driver uses a protocol which is very different from RFC 2734 (IPv4 over IEEE 1394). so don't go expecting them to be besties, because they are NOT 🙈

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Debian · July 16, 2005 — that's the source and the date, mwah, thanks for reading bestie, ily, go compile something 🎀✨💖