Re: Exposing device ids and driver names

[Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>]

Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> Please CC me on any responses as I'm not subscribed to lkml.
> 
> I have the aim at creating two tools helpful to linux.  The first tool 
> is a driver regression test of sorts.  I want to be able to create 
> essentially a time line of hardware support as they appear in distros. 
> The second tool, related to the first, is a program which runs on 
> Windows and scans for a user's hardware and tells them which distro will 
> best support their hardware.  I already have a working prototype of 
> these two tools.  It currently uses the data exported by modinfo.  This 
> however does not provide transparency for drivers compiled into the kernel.

Hardware support also depends on userland:  Udev rules, libraries,
application programs.

Even if you ignore that for now and only look at the kernel part of
hardware support:  Beyond "doesn't have a matching driver" and "does
have", there is a large and impossible to track grey area of "has a
poorly working driver" and "has a perfectly working driver".
-- 
Stefan Richter
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http://arcgraph.de/sr/