Re: i give up

>>>I have some ideas on that. The problem is it's sometimes hard to check
>>>that given hardware is supported by FreeBSD, even in case you know and
>>>want to do it. The list of supported hardware is often written in terms
>>>of chipsets and manufacturers often produce cards using supported chips,
>>>but named after their own trademark.

I wonder if there's some way to partially automate
collecting some of this information.

Something like a "register" program people can
use to register their FreeBSD installation that
would optionally include hardware information.
(Get a list of hardware IDs and running drivers
from the kernel, then prompt the user to enter
the actual hardware manufacturer/brand name for
each one.)

Then the process of registering the OS installation
would also collect a lot of information about
"known good" hardware.

Bonus points, of course, if the register program
first queries the web site to collect lists of
hardware names that other people have already
entered so that most of the time people can simply
click and say "I'm using that one" and only
occasionally have to type in a new brand name.

The cross-reference information of vendor, hardware
ID, driver, and OS version would be very valuable
for people setting up new systems.  Of course,
you'd want to keep careful counts of how often each
piece of hardware was registered and provide an easy
way for human editors to be able to clean up data
afterwards, since there will be a certain amount
of mispellings and simple nonsense.

Tim