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    SubjectRe: GPL only modules [was Re: [GIT PATCH] more Driver core patches for 2.6.19]
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    On Wednesday 20 December 2006 16:11, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
    > On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:57:45 +1100, Marek Wawrzyczny said:
    > > On Sunday 17 December 2006 21:11, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
    > > And if you let yourself get carried away, you can also imagine a little
    > > multi-platform utility. It would run on a test system collecting PCI IDs
    > > before submitting them to the site to get the system's overall Linux
    > > friendliness rating.
    >
    > This is a can of worms, and then some. For instance, let's consider this
    > Latitude. *THIS* one has an NVidia Quadro NVS 110M in it. However, that's
    > not the default graphics card on a Latitude D820. So what number do you
    > put in? Do you use:

    No, no, no... I was never proposing that. I was thinking of something more
    along the lines of reporting back on open-source friendliness of
    manufacturers of devices, and perhaps on the availability of open source
    drivers for the devices. I am talking only about "detected" devices. The
    database would never try and guess the vendor, model and variation of the
    system.

    > (Remember that "users" have different criteria than "developers" - most
    > users would consider this entire thread "intellectual wanking", especially
    > since the patch that spawned it got withdrawn. And 'Frames Per Second'
    > trumps that stupid little 'P' in the oops message. Failure to understand
    > this mindset guarantees that your computation of a "friendliness rating"
    > is yet more intellectual wanking... ;)

    I actually find that trying to obtain information about what hardware is/isn't
    supported in Linux is actually quite difficult to obtain. The information
    that's on the internet is either outdated or has not yet been written.
    I was hoping to analyze the system's device information together with
    driver/device information obtained from the kernel source itself to give
    users a better (but not perhaps not as authoritative as I'd like to) picture
    of what to expect.

    > And then there's stuff on this machine that are *not* options, but don't
    > matter to me. I see an 'O2 Micro' Firewire in the 'lspci' output. I have
    > no idea how well it works. I don't care what it contributes to the score.
    > On the other hand, somebody who uses external Firewire disk enclosures may
    > be *very* concerned about it, but not care in the slightest about the
    > wireless card.

    Perhaps we just report on the individual devices then... forget the system
    rating.

    > Bonus points for figuring out what to do with systems that have some chip
    > that's a supported XYZ driver, but wired up behind a squirrely bridge with
    > some totally bizarre IRQ allocation, so you end up with something that's
    > visible on lspci but not actually *usable* in any real sense of the term...

    Hmmm... does this happen often? False results are definedly a show stopper.
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