On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 08:35 +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > > What they are interested about, is having *us*, Debian, to certify that > > their hardware work on our system, so that their customer trust they can > > buy it to run Debian. It'd be a bit weird if they were certifying > > themselves. > > I think that Debian members/contributors do not and should not hold a > monopoly on verifying that Debian works on a particular piece of > hardware. > As members, we should come up with a "Certification Policy" guide. Which should define what constitutes a particular machine being marked certified. Then a testsuite could be built accordingly. > I think a better approach would be to produce a Debian Live image that > on boot checks as much of the hardware as possible automatically and > lists a checklist for verifying the rest of the hardware works. Anyone > could run the image and the resulting report could be uploaded to > hardware.d.o, where it would be displayed publicly and count as a > "certification". This way users can trust Debian to run on the > hardware and there is no monopoly on certification. ISTR Ubuntu's > certification stuff works similarly except that only Ubuntu can give > the certification mark, probably in exchange for money. > It will have to go beyond the "does boot" scope, in my opinion. Like most other Enterprise Linux Distributions, Debian too picks a particular kernel (stable- lts) and to some extent also backports fixes into it. That makes it a completely unique kernel, against which certification needs to be done. In all the certification tools I've worked with, rigorous stress tests are the most important part. For example, for file systems, doing large amounts of I/O with different chunks; Buffered and Direct I/O etc. Single queue, multi queue. WRITE_SAME and TRIM related HW Commands. CPU Burn, Memory tests, Network etc. All core components of a server hardware needs tests to certify any server hardware. > In any case, hardware vendors are in a much better position to be able > to certify that Debian runs on their hardware than we are. They know > exactly what functionality should be present and have access to get > more hardware in case running Debian bricks their devices. Yes. But I think we need to provide a tool, process and guideline for them to follow. So far, from what I've checked, not much engagement has been initiated from the hardware vendors. -- Given the large number of mailing lists I follow, I request you to CC me in replies for quicker response
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