From Harvey Harrison: I've been working through annotating the endianness problems in drivers/ieee1394/ and think I may have come across a missing swap in dv1394.c. This would only effect big-endian boxes. Starting at line 2113: next->u.in.il.q[0] |= 3 << 20; /* enable interrupt */ next->u.in.il.q[2] = 0; /* disable branch */ /* link previous to next */ prev_i = (next_i == 0) ? (MAX_PACKETS * video->n_frames - 1) : (next_i - 1); f = video->frames[prev_i / MAX_PACKETS]; prev = &(f->descriptor_pool[prev_i % MAX_PACKETS]); if (prev_i % (MAX_PACKETS/2)) { prev->u.in.il.q[0] &= ~(3 << 20); /* no interrupt */ } else { prev->u.in.il.q[0] |= 3 << 20; /* enable interrupt */ } I think all three accesses of .q[0] should be cpu_to_le32(3 << 20) or ~cpu_to_le32(3 << 20) as appropriate. It's treated as a little-endian register averywhere else in code.