From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Nov 30 18:37:43 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3D8CF1065672 for ; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:37:43 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kientzle@freebsd.org) Received: from kientzle.com (kientzle.com [66.166.149.50]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F0028FC18 for ; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:37:42 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kientzle@freebsd.org) Received: from [10.123.2.178] (p53.kientzle.com [66.166.149.53]) by kientzle.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id mAUIbetv095108; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:37:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kientzle@freebsd.org) Message-ID: <4932DD73.9000109@freebsd.org> Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:37:39 -0800 From: Tim Kientzle User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20060422 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Beech Rintoul References: <20081128234155.0221e263@serene.no-ip.org> <3cb459ed0811291342i524eaab3g1acadcd9cbdb638b@mail.gmail.com> <7d6fde3d0811291556g3f08a814td68466ad02dee4fc@mail.gmail.com> <200811291515.01962.beech@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <200811291515.01962.beech@freebsd.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Garrett Cooper , "Conrad J. Sabatier" , freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Alexander Churanov Subject: Re: i give up X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:37:43 -0000 >>>I have some ideas on that. The problem is it's sometimes hard to check >>>that given hardware is supported by FreeBSD, even in case you know and >>>want to do it. The list of supported hardware is often written in terms >>>of chipsets and manufacturers often produce cards using supported chips, >>>but named after their own trademark. I wonder if there's some way to partially automate collecting some of this information. Something like a "register" program people can use to register their FreeBSD installation that would optionally include hardware information. (Get a list of hardware IDs and running drivers from the kernel, then prompt the user to enter the actual hardware manufacturer/brand name for each one.) Then the process of registering the OS installation would also collect a lot of information about "known good" hardware. Bonus points, of course, if the register program first queries the web site to collect lists of hardware names that other people have already entered so that most of the time people can simply click and say "I'm using that one" and only occasionally have to type in a new brand name. The cross-reference information of vendor, hardware ID, driver, and OS version would be very valuable for people setting up new systems. Of course, you'd want to keep careful counts of how often each piece of hardware was registered and provide an easy way for human editors to be able to clean up data afterwards, since there will be a certain amount of mispellings and simple nonsense. Tim