Michael K. Johnson wrote:
One thing I want to see happen is a self-service hardware compatibility service that makes it easy for users to provide information on the compatibility they are seeing with their hardware on Fedora, and for which the information is well-enough organized that you can actually have good searches for that information.
There is two sources of good information: linux-kernel and Xfree86. Nearly all devices carry a PCI_ID information inside. Linux kernel and Xfree86 usually collect it to load the correct device driver.
This is a big project, and is better to split it in chunks, basic PCI HW(SCSI, VIDEO, NET...) first and latter more(USB....):
1- HW detection by Anaconda and kuzdzu
pcitable from hwdata package is the best place to begin. I have done some work and I am waiting for Martin Mares from http://pciids.sf.net to send updates to hwdata maintainers.
2 - Documentation about HW supported.
Greg KH greg@kroah.com said me in linux-kernel nl that devices supported by kernel are "already listed in the MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE and can be parsed later by userspace tools quite easily."
Xfree86 :-?
Volunteers? where are python wizards :-) ?
I hope to see some documentation as FreeBSD has: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.1R/hardware-i386.html