Re: Some ideas regarding hardware detection and the installation system
Today I made a small step further on my plan for better hardware
support in Debian. I added support in discover version 2.1.2-1 for
calling module-assistant in discover-pkginstall, and fixed a few
long-standing bugs in the debconf handling in that script.
With this change in place, calling discover-pkginstall will
- detect hardware and extract the list of packages supported by this
hardware
- install the packages
- if any of the packages were kernel module source packages, it will
call module-assistant {prepare,build,install} for the package, to
compile the kernel module and make it available in the installed
system.
Not very many kernel module source packages are recognized by the
discover-data package at the moment. Two devices using the
qla2x00-source package is all there is at the moment. The problem
with maintaining the mapping from hardware to debian package still
remain. At the moment it depend on manual updates based on user
feedback. If you know some hardware that is supported by a given
kernel module source package, please report them as wishlist bugs
against discover-data. If you want to test this feature you can add
entries to the /lib/discover/pci-device.xml file yourself. :)
I believe the next step is to call the discover-pkginstall script from
d-i during installation, to get the required packages installed.
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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