Hi,
we want to do something like this [1], but not over firewire and with as little hardware as possible (for the "wow"-effect). We are still in the planning phase, that's why I'm asking here, whether this idea is in general possible or not and which hardware requirements and problems more experienced people like you see.
Our primary domain is IT security and we have rather sparse in-depth knowledge in the hardware domain. Yes, we do know I2C, SPI, computer- and µC-architectures etc. (so no absolute beginners), but some detailed and understandable documentation about DMA would be helpful. So, if you can recommend anything...
About the bandwith / speed problem: Our hope was, that we could negotiate a very slow transfer speed and receive only smaller chunks of the host's RAM at a time, so that a cheap µC or ARM device (like a Raspberry Pi) could handle it. Maybe (so our thoughts) we could use some standard / generic device driver that the OS has loaded anyway (if one is needed), like for optical drives or so. But if the host's CPU initiates and controls each transfer (as you and Wikipedia tell me), then it will be rather hard because we have to abuse such a device driver somehow to get the DMA transfers initialized.
Sebastian