The ASUS P8Z68-V FireWire saga

Aug 7th, 2026 - scudo

A few months ago, I got gifted a "new" desktop PC with an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO GEN/3 motherboard.

This board is really interesting because it is recent enough to support UEFI (although not very well and I will make a future post explaining the situation) and USB3 but also old enough to still have PCI slots and... a built-in FireWire controller, a VIA VT6306.

In order to use the FireWire functionality, a bracket that connects to a header on the motherboard has to be used; since I had an older ASUS board (a P5B-VM) that had FireWire functionality as well, I tried to use that.

I happen to have two digital DV cameras, so I tested them with the connector, to no avail. And they should be compatible... Here is the P5B-VM:


And here is my board:


As long as you plug in the second header, it should work.

I have two MiniDV cameras, one is a Canon MV700 and the other is a Panasonic NV-GS8, both with a small FireWire 400 connector for which I have a cable to connect it to a full-size FireWire 400 (AKA 1394a); said cable works with both cameras while interfacing to a 2006 MacBook Pro running iMovie HD:


As you can see, it works just fine here. (As a side note, I was using the Canon because the Panasonic has a shitass DV mechanism which is kinda loud)

When I try to connect the Panasonic camera via 1394a, nothing happens; the 1394 kernel module does not pick it up, dvgrab says there is no camera connected. The Canon yields a slightly different result; I get a lot of Rediscovered device fw0 in my logs and nothing more.

I tried multiple things to fix the problem:

• I tried changing program
• I tried taking ownership and changing permissions for /dev/fw0
• I tried changing parameters and quirks for the 1394 kernel module (to no avail; also there is no debug parameter for this module)
• I tried changing OS; Windows 10 yields the same problem
• I checked the code for the 1394 kernel module to see if I could find some way of getting some extra logs

The only hint I got was from firescope, a program meant to debug the Linux kernel via FireWire, because it told me that the bus was being reset constantly. I have no idea if that is actually the problem.

I actually have more FireWire controllers at my disposal, both on PCI cards; the first is an unnamed card based on the same VIA chipset my mainboard has, and yields the same results, and the other is this card based on the Agere FW323 chip.

This card emits a loud high pitched whine that sounds like a capacitor is about to blow up when I power it on, so I have no idea if it actually works or not because I do not appreciate the idea of having my room stink for weeks because a capacitor blew up. Trust me, it's bad.

There are some unsourced claims that say that Windows 8/10 broke the FireWire stack somehow (despite the fact that I know for other people it just works...?) and the same goes for Linux after circa 2008 (despite the fact there was a complete from-scratch rewrite of the kernel modules that happened... well, circa 2008, funnily enough).

I have no idea if these claims make sense, as installing any OS on this computer is kind of a pain in the ass. Maybe XP works? I should try it. (With what drivers, though?)