i give up

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Tim Kientzle <kientzle at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Andrew Reilly wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:37:39AM -0800, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>>
>>> I wonder if there's some way to partially automate
>>> collecting some of this information.
>>
>> There is.  Just install ports/sysutils/bsdstats, set the
>> appropriate frobs in /etc/rc.conf and be happy.  Look at the
>> http://bsdstats.org/ page from time to time.
>
> This is a start towards what I had in mind, but
> still has a ways to go.  Here are a few questions
> I would like to ask of such a database:
>
> "What ethernet cards have people used with FreeBSD 7.0?"
>
>  This would require being able to start from
>  a particular OS (and version?).
>
> "I have a Broadcom card, what driver do I need with FreeBSD 7?"
>
>  This requires being able to navigate from OS/version
>  to device type, manufacturer, then driver.  This
>  should also have callouts for any driver that's not
>  part of the GENERIC kernel.
>
> "pciconf just gave me an ID xyz123; what chip is that?"
>
>  I see device names but not hardware-level IDs.
>
> "Any suggestions for a good network card to buy?"
>
>  This information seems to stop at the chipset level.
>  When I go to the store, very few boxes have chipset
>  names on them.  It would be good to give users the
>  option to provide a manufacturer (and product name?)
>  for the card or motherboard in use.  Such information
>  would necessarily be more sporadic than the automatically
>  collected information, but it would build up over time.
>
> Based on the numbers here, I'm going to guess that
> PC-BSD has this service turned on by default.  You
> should talk to folks maintaining installers for other
> systems about possibly getting it integrated there.
> (With clearly-worded notices about data being anonymous,
> etc.)
>
> It would also be interesting to use this from the installer
> to look up missing drivers (enumerate PCI IDs for any
> device that didn't attach a driver and query the bsdstats
> service for information about that device); this would
> make it a lot easier for users to find drivers supported
> out-of-tree.
>
> Such a database could provide very useful information to the
> development community ("most popular unsupported ethernet
> cards") and to users ("most popular supported ethernet
> cards").
>
> Tim

Sounds like you're looking for something like Kudzu for Redhat.
-Garrett