Firewire 2024: Today's Macs and Sequoia?

[Babz]

I know there have been a few threads on this over the years, but what is the latest?

Is anyone out there who has got MOTU and/or UAD Firewire interfaces working with the latest Macs running the latest OS (Sequoia)?

I’m still running an old Mac with 828mk3 FW + UAD Satellite FW and one of the things that has been holding me back has been not wanting to have to repurchase thousands of dollars worth of audio hardware just because of port incompatibility.

I know MOTU doesn’t officially support FW anymore. But I’ve heard of people keeping their old FW interfaces working via Thunderbolt to FW adapters and possibly involving some driver jiggery pokery. However, I haven’t heard from anyone doing it recently, with currently Macs and Sequoia.

I’m thinking of getting the new Mac Mini which has three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and two USB-C ports and ships with Sonoma.

Any info, reports, experience, advice, in this area most appreciated.
Thanks!

[mikehalloran]

You'll need the two Apple adapters. Nice to see that Apple has un-discontinued" the FW–TB Adapter. FW cable into that, then plugged into Apple's TB2-TB3 adapter into your Mac.

(correction: FW–TB Adapter still discontinued but someone on Amazon has them at less than half what's being asked on eBay)
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Thunderbol ... 00SQ2CJUS/

Two sets of instructions must be followed , one before installing the drivers, the other after.

viewtopic.php?t=74610

This is the correct driver. You will find it under 828mk3 Hybrid. My 828mkII FW is working over Sequoia

MOTU Audio Installer
Mac v89555 | Oct. 13, 2021
macOS 14, macOS 13, macOS 12, macOS 11

[HCMarkus]

Mike is The Man.

[monkey man]

Mike is The Man.

Ain't that the truth brother.

[James Steele]

Yeah... I saw that Babz asked this in the Facebook Group and someone just flatly said that Firewire isn't supported in MacOS anymore.

[stubbsonic]

Yeah... I saw that Babz asked this in the Facebook Group and someone just flatly said that Firewire isn't supported in MacOS anymore.

Well, in a way, they're not wrong. It's not "supported", but it might work for a while.

[bayswater]

Yeah... I saw that Babz asked this in the Facebook Group and someone just flatly said that Firewire isn't supported in MacOS anymore.

Well, in a way, they're not wrong. It's not "supported", but it might work for a while.

But it’s not “working” now is it? Presumably, the Mac running Seq in that setup is not working with FW, it’s working with a signal that was FW before it reached the mac but is now TB. If it’s TB and meets the TB specs, why would it stop working, as long as TB is supported? Or is the converted signal some sort of kludge that is close to TB and happens to work for the moment?

[James Steele]

Yeah... I saw that Babz asked this in the Facebook Group and someone just flatly said that Firewire isn't supported in MacOS anymore.

Well, in a way, they're not wrong. It's not "supported", but it might work for a while.

Yep. It was just stated in a way that implied it was flat impossible. Not today I guess.

[mikehalloran]

To be clear: Thunderbolt supports most of the FireWire spec and that's why it works—although Intel owns TB, Apple developed it. If/when a future USB or other protocol is adopted that no longer supports most of Thunderbolt, then FW will no longer function.

One limitation is that the Apple FW-TB Adapter only passes 7.7V of the 27V FW spec making bus power fairly useless for most devices.

Although Apple calls their ports TB 3/4/5, in reality they support the underlying USB 4 (TB3/4) or 4.2 (TB5) protocols. Unlike Intel's TB specs, these are backward compatible to USB 2/1.1 skipping USB 3.2 (now called 3.2 gen 2+2) which is only supported over TB2 if you use the Apple TB2-TB3 adapter.

Backward compatibility on Windows is a friggin nightmare but not on the Mac. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the VIs on my USB 4 external could be used by my 2012 MBPs via the FW, TB2 and USB 2 ports depending on which adapters/cables I used.

[dgatwood]

To be clear: Thunderbolt supports most of the FireWire spec and that's why it works—although Intel owns TB, Apple developed it. If/when a future USB or other protocol is adopted that no longer supports most of Thunderbolt, then FW will no longer function.

Thunderbolt doesn't directly support any of the FireWire spec. Thunderbolt is just a dumb pipe that provides multiple channels (byte lanes) for moving bulk data into and out of the machine.

The Thunderbolt standard supports four main modes (unless I'm forgetting one): USB pass-through, DisplayPort pass-through, Thunderbolt computer-to-computer networking, and PCI bridging, along with various modes that combine multiple modes in various ways (e.g. using two lanes for USB and two for lower-bandwidth DisplayPort modes). Apple's Thunderbolt adapter uses PCI mode.

Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter contains two main pieces: a Thunderbolt to PCI Express bridge chip, which turns Thunderbolt 1/2 into a single-lane (bidirectional) PCI Express bus, and a FireWire PCI express chip connected to that PCI Express bus.

Ignoring the additional drivers used to configure the Thunderbolt side, the operating system sees the FireWire chipset as though it were just a bog-standard FireWire card connected to a slightly-higher-than-normal-latency PCIe slot. As long as it is still possible to put a Lucent FireWire card (IIRC) into a Mac Pro and have it work, the FireWire adapter should also continue to work, because that's literally what it is, just size-reduced and without the bus power conversion hardware that would be present in an actual PCIe card.

This also means that in addition to depending on Thunderbolt's PCIe support (which is unlikely to ever go away unless and until Thunderbolt itself does), it also depends on Apple continuing to provide FireWire support in the kernel — specifically, the IOFireWireFamily kernel extension. If that ever goes away, you'll either have to find a way to build your own copy of the kext and get it to correctly link against the current version of the macOS kernel or you won't be able to keep FireWire devices running.

That said, Sequoia does still have the FireWire family kext built in, and according to github, there has been exactly one change to it in the last three years (which was made in Sequoia) that involved changing from a fixed-size buffer to a dynamically allocated buffer, presumably for compatibility with some change higher up in the stack. As changes go, it was a really minor change. Other than that, it hasn't changed at all since version 483, which was the first version that supported ARM.

In other words, there's basically zero effort going into it other than keeping it building, which means there's also probably close to zero chance of it breaking meaningfully, and the lack of it being a big nuisance for Apple is probably good news in terms of them keeping it running.

[grrrz]

Yeah... I saw that Babz asked this in the Facebook Group and someone just flatly said that Firewire isn't supported in MacOS anymore.

Well, in a way, they're not wrong. It's not "supported", but it might work for a while.

But it’s not “working” now is it? Presumably, the Mac running Seq in that setup is not working with FW, it’s working with a signal that was FW before it reached the mac but is now TB. If it’s TB and meets the TB specs, why would it stop working, as long as TB is supported? Or is the converted signal some sort of kludge that is close to TB and happens to work for the moment?

the mac directly recognize firewire; you can see the firewire interface in the system report.
For me beside bus power the only thing that cause issues is standby mode; the mac will crash if I try waking it up with the soundcard on and plugged in. I simply deactivate the standby mode when plugged to AC to deal with the issue (and turn it off when I want actual standby)

[Phil O]

That said, Sequoia does still have the FireWire family kext built in...

Does that mean that devices that used Apple's firewire drivers will still work? I thought Apple abandoned firewire a couple of OS's ago.

Your friendly neighborhood Phil

[mikehalloran]

That said, Sequoia does still have the FireWire family kext built in...

Does that mean that devices that used Apple's firewire drivers will still work? I thought Apple abandoned firewire a couple of OS's ago.

Your friendly neighborhood Phil

Intel never supported FireWire. Apple stopped in 2013. The 2012 model Macs with FW ports can run Catalina without a hack. As long as Apple still includes the FW family .kext, there is no reason why those devices won’t work over USB 4/4.2 (TB3/4/5) with the proper adapters.

MOTU has never had separate Mac drivers for FW/TB/USB.

My 828mk2 FW is fully functional over Sequoia. I have screen shots on my Mac when I get back to it.

[Phil O]

Thanks, Mike. I have the appropriate adapters and I'm going to try my old firewire Appogee Rosetta on my M1 Mac Mini.

Your friendly neighborhood Phil

[mikehalloran]

Here's that screenshot showing the 828mkII FW. Both Audio & MIDI are working over Sequoia 15.1.1