Re: Supported or Certified Hardware
On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 02:04:34PM -0400, Mike Houle wrote:
[Reformatted to remove HTML]
> Hi,
> I am a QA engineer at Sun Microsystems and have been tasked
> with looking into supporting Debian on some of our
> systems. Many other OS vendors have a certification program for
> hardware and systems, where a series of tests are run and upon
> completion, the system/hardware is posted to a list of "certified
> hardware" for that OS. Is there any such program for Debian?
Speaking purely as my opinion - and not necessarily on the part of the
project or the Sparc port developers :)
No, not as such. Debian is an association of volunteer developers
and our OS is supported by volunteers. Debian prides itself on running
Linux kernels on a wide variety of hardware - from supercomputers to
PDAs to network attached storage devices - and on maintaining
application ports to eleven or twelve machine architectures. You can run
an entire distribution on Sun / Alpha / Intel 32 bit / AMD/Intel 64 bit
with barely a change. (We're currently having difficulty supporting some
of the older 32 bit Sun machines beyond the current Debian stable - but
that's as much a function of kernel support and lack of older machines
as anything. It's possibly the same if you want to get Solaris 10 onto
a Sun Sparc 20 at this point.)
<Rash generalisation> Debian should run on newer Sun Sparc and Intel/AMD
processor-based hardware with no particular difficulty: because there is
no Debian hardware bias/particular commercial axe to grind in favour of
one hardware vendor or another, there should be no "business interests"
obstacles. </Rash>
> If so, can someone please provide me with information or a contact to
> get involved in this process? If there isn't a process for
> certification, is there anywhere that a list of "supported" hardware
> exists, and how could a systems vendor get their products on this
> list? I would like to learn more about what certification program, if
> any, exists, and what it would require to certify systems for Debian
We don't normally do "Certified to run Debian" stickers - if someone
has hardware that looks interesting and can loan us some, there's likely
to be a Debian port if enough people are interested. IBM loaned time on
an s390, HP have loaned time, employed Debian developers on staff and
helped Debian with donations to help maintain the ports for HP-PA
and Itanium architectures.
Since Debian isn't in the business of selling boxed sets / commercial
support / industry partnerships with competing OS vendors / middleware,
training or applications we don't have the pressure of being a vendor
per se - but we do support our users - they, in turn may come to Sun to
say "I'm thinking of running Debian on Sun hardware - do _you_ support
Debian on your hardware".
As far as I can see, this is exactly the line that HP are now taking -
they will support Debian on HP hardware in some configurations and will
supply help to get it installed - they've "self certified" because the
customer demand is there and HP have accepted that the support burden
for Debian on their hardware is feasible for them, given that they also
support other Linuxes. Dell, by contrast, have taken the initial
tentative step of partnering with a commercial Debian derivative,
providing a minimal level of "it works on our hardware" certification and
effectively passing support burden on to Canonical - at least in the short
term.
> Mike
>
> Mike Houle
> OS Certification Lead
> Global Design Group
>
All the best,
Andy
[Possibly better to follow this up on the general debian-devel mailing
list for Debian developers or the specific debian-sparc list - see the
main Debian page for mailing list subscription instructions.]
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