Re: Exposing device ids and driver names

From: Nathaniel McCallum
Date: Thu Oct 01 2009 - 14:29:00 EST


On 10/01/2009 02:23 PM, Stefan Richter wrote:
Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
On 10/01/2009 01:47 PM, Stefan Richter wrote:
Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
[...]
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.
[...]
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".

There are even more factors for how well something works or even whether
it works at all: It may even depend on combinations of two pieces of
hardware, e.g. bus adapter and device on that bus. It may depend on
device firmware revisions.

Yes, I'm aware of this and will account for it as best as I am able.
[...]
you are correct that we cannot predict 100% of user
experience. But 70% is a huge improvement over 0%.

So, this 2nd tool can't literally say which distribution supports a
device best. It can mostly just list which distributions contain a
matching kernel driver.

I never said that. What I said is that I will "do my best." This will include using other data sources, such as Xorg drivers, libusb drivers, user feedback, etc.

Nathaniel
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/