Neither AVT nor Basler offer FireWire support in their official SDKs. (Both companies were asked in August 2016)

There is an open source project about contorling FireWire cameras in Linux:
Coriander project
https://ieee1394.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Libraries
https://sourceforge.net/projects/libdc1394/

Coriander has been sucessfully compiled and run on sdlx029 running CentOS7. The executable also run on a frontend after installing gnome libraries. I could run two cameras in parallel, a Basler A311f and a AVT Marlin F033b.

Issues:

• So far, only one specific FireWire card worked well with Linux (see below). None of the PCI express or other PCI cards I tested was recognised. OnBoad FireWire ports also were not recognised.

• I tested two of these FireWire cards and one of them had the problem, that only cameras connected to one port were recognised. Nothing happened when I plugged them in the other port. The card is currently in sdlx029.
• The Coriander software sometimes hangs or doesn't find the cameras
• “Extracting” the camera code out of Coriander is NOT EASY!

Conclusion: In principle it is possible to read out FireWire cameras in Linux. Programming a FESA class for this is not trivial. E.g. all image transformation functions (mirror, rotate, histogram, projections, …) have to be programmed by oneself (or a suitable library). In the original BIF setup, this is done by LabView. We wait for a decision, if/which Unilac systems HAVE to be transferred to the new control system for the coming beam time.