I just played around with lshw a bit. We should totally make it export
JSON. We can then submit this directly (as one census plugin).
On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Don Zickus <dzickus(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 10:49:02PM +0000, Jeremy Cline wrote:
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> For some time now, Fedora has operated without a database of hardware
>> users have. Smolt, the old hardware database, was retired in 2012[0] and
>> its intended successor[1] was never deployed by Fedora Infrastructure.
>>
>> It would be nice to have a hardware database, so I (and hopefully some
>> others) would like to get Census up and running for Fedora. Before we
>> look at deploying Census, however, it would be good to make sure it has
>> everything we need.
>>
>> Census has client plugins to collect information[2]. At the moment, it
>> has plugins for:
>>
>> * The vendor, device, subsystem_vendor, subsystem_device, and class from
>> each PCI device
>>
>> * The idVendor, idProduct, bcdDevice, and bDeviceClass for USB devices
>> as well as the bInterfaceClass, bInterfaceSubClass, and
>> bInterfaceProtocol for each interface
>>
>> * The contents of /etc/os-release
>>
>> * All the RPMs installed on a system
>>
>> Other than the drivers bound to the PCI and USB devices (which is an
>> open PR[3]), what else would be good to collect?
>>
>> [0]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Smolt_retirement
>> [1]
https://github.com/npmccallum/census
>> [2]
https://github.com/npmccallum/census/blob/master/client/plugins/
>> [3]
https://github.com/npmccallum/census/pull/3
>
> Internally, we have been focusing on using 'lshw' as the tool that provides
> all that info and handles all the arch funkiness (and includes firmware).
> If there is anything missing, we have tried to push upstream to that
> project.
>
> Would that cover a lot of the info you are looking for?
>
> Cheers,
> Don