I am happy to announce that RME Fireface FireWire interfaces (400, 800, UCX, UFX, 802) from now on have stable drivers in linux again!!

Kernel 5.14.0 introduced a bug that caused a deadlock between the firewire driver and the fireface driver (essentially), resulting in a full system freeze when streaming to the interface, especially via ALSA.
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-sound/202 … n.local/T/

The patch has also been sent to the mainline and stable mailing lists:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-sound/87e … 1a1098466a

It will be included from the following kernels and onward:
mainline:
* 6.11-rc2
stable:
* 6.10.4
longterm:
* 6.6.45
* 6.1.104
* 5.15.165

A different regression that would bitcrush the audio stream was introduced in v6.9-rc2:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-sound/n4j … k7mqe/T/#u

mainline:
commits:
00e3913b0416fe69d28745c0a2a340e2f76c219c
c1839501fe3e67d98635f159dba8b170d08f6521
fixed since:
6.11-rc1

stable:
commit:
2afaf0b52fb125eb31d95b8f814863e92e7454bb
fixed since:
6.10.3

Since these patches went through before the deadlock patch, the mainline, stable and longterm kernels above (or their successors) are suggested, they will have both patches.

Depending on your distribution, the new kernel may take a while to arrive in your package manager.

With 6.11 yet to be released, to use the latest kernel but also have a working fireface you may want to build it from source.
Though it may seem daunting, building the kernel from source really isn't all that difficult, it just takes a while.
It is likely you can find a good and thorough tutorial on how to build and install it for your distribution if you want to use the new kernel earlier.
A hint:
You can reuse your distribution's .config file!
Running 'make menuconfig' and saving will populate the .config file with the defaults if the versions mismatch.
Then you can run 'make -j$(nproc)' to build it on all cpu cores.

I've been using my Fireface 800 since: it works great, on a modern system!

The FFADO mixer allows configuration of the interface and will even receive some nice usability upgrades version 2.5.0 is released.

I'd like to thank RME for designing such wonderful (and longlived) interfaces and the linux-firewire-sound team for creating and maintaining the drivers.