What FireWire is

IEEE 1394, Firewire or i.Link are different names for one and the same high-speed serial bus specification. People often consider Firewire as a complement to USB, however it gives much higher speeds (up to 1.2 Gigabit(P1394B)) and it's designed to be high-speed for both synchronous as well as asynchronous video/audio/data transfer.

Initially IEEE 1394 was mainly used within Audio/Video editing environments but more recently it is being integrated into more and more end-user hardware. A lot of desktops and laptops are being shipped with FireWire ports in addition to USB ports.

The mostly used firewire standard defines speeds up to 400 Mbits/s and that's the version I had access to when performing these tests.

Firewire has been supported on Linux since version 2.3.40, it currently is supported from version 2.2 through 2.5. Not all chipsets are supported yet, however most Texas Instruments and OHCI based chips are supported. Next to the support for different peripheral devices there is also support for TCP/IP over firewire, and that's what I planned to use.