Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 09:42:49 -0700
From: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
To: Nathaniel McCallum <nathaniel@natemccallum.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Exposing device ids and driver names
Message-ID: <20091001164249.GA2715@kroah.com>
References: <4AC4DB65.8070404@natemccallum.com>
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On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 12:40:05PM -0400, 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.

That's going to be interesting, as all distros pretty much use the same
kernel, it will just depend on who is "newer" at the moment, right?

> 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.

Most distros don't build drivers into the kernel, so you should be fine
with what you have today, right?  Or have you run into problems with
this?

Why not just use the baseline kernel as a model for this.  Do a 'make
allmodconfig' and then extract the data and publish it that way.  No
kernel changes are needed, and then any distro can be easily matched up
by this based on what they are using.  That will save you time in
downloading zillions of distro releases, and provide a nice easy way to
show what the kernel.org releases support.

thanks,

greg k-h
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