[Popcon-developers] Proposal to collect limited hardware data via popcon
Bryce Nesbitt
bryce2 at obviously.com
Thu Jul 7 22:33:00 UTC 2011
Greetings popcon developers.
Having recently had the frustration of purchasing a mainboard and some
usb devices that are not fully functional under Linux, my attention
focused on how to collect good data on what works. Thus I'd like to
discuss the idea of having popularity-contest collect some additional
data on the user's hardware.
This of course has some privacy and social contract issues. And it would
be a major change in scope of popcon.
WHY:
My goal is to provide strong data on which hardware is widely deployed
on Linux installations, and provide the core for a commenting feature
where users can supply additional data.
Purchasers of hardware could focus on purchasing devices with lots of
other users, in the hopes that any problems would be problems in common.
The data may also provide vendors with some incentive to support Linux.
And it may help guide regression testing.
WHY POPCON:
Popularity contest is widely deployed and trusted. Collecting
additional data is a natural. Nothing else comes close in terms of breadth.
SIMILAR EFFORTS:
For many years there has been a database for USB devices at qbik.ch.
The problem with this approach is that it is fully user reported data.
There is no incentive to report devices that work fine, and no way to
tag items as fixed in a particular Kernel revision. For an example see:
http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=3834
For suspend/resume data there is a data collection effort. But again
the effort is biased
towards mainboards on which there are problems. See:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/SuspendResumeTesting
SAMPLE DATA COLLECTED:
I've written scripts for /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ and /etc/cron.daily
to collect the relevant data. Here's an example dump for your comments:
{
"_timestamp" : 1310075257,
"_comment" : "Hardware data collected by popularity-contest package",
"system" : {
"manufacturer" : "Intel Corporation",
"product_name" : "DX58SO2"
"uname" : "Linux ubuntu 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr
11 03:31:24 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux"
"suspend_count" : 3,
"suspend_timestamp" : 1310075356
"resume_count" : 0,
"resume_timestamp" : 1310075356
},
"usb" : {
"0bb4:0c01" : "High Tech Computer Corp. Dream / ADP1 / G1 Phone",
"048d:1336" : "Integrated Technology Express, Inc. ",
"0db0:3871" : "Micro Star International ",
"1d6b:0002" : "Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub",
"1d6b:0001" : "Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub",
"0510:0032" : "Sejin Electron, Inc. ",
"1d6b:0003" : "Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub",
"0db0:a871" : "Micro Star International ",
"046d:c00c" : "Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse",
"152d:2329" : "JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology
Corp. transcend storejet 25P"
},
"pci" : {
"8086:340e" : "",
"8086:3a16" : "",
"8086:10cd" : "",
"8086:244e" : "",
"1b4b:9123" : "",
"8086:3426" : "",
"8086:3a36" : "",
"8086:3a42" : "",
"8086:3a44" : "",
"8086:3a3e" : "",
"8086:3a3c" : "",
"8086:3a20" : "",
"8086:3a38" : "",
"11ab:6121" : ""
},
"usb_comments" : {
"0bb4:0c01" : {
"comment" : "",
"name" : "High Tech Computer Corp. Dream / ADP1 / G1 Phone",
"rating" : "****"
},
"0fff:0032" : {
"comment" : "*",
"name" : "USB Scanner",
"rating" : "Cheap no-name device from China: always produced
black streaks under Linux. Worked OK under Windows XP.",
"uname" : "Linux ubuntu 2.5.23-1-generic"
},
"046d:c00c" : {
"comment" : "",
"name" : "Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse",
"rating" : "****"
},
"152d:2329" : {
"comment" : "Works perfectly under Linux. Unlike many similar
devices, supports SMART status via smartctrl.",
"name" : "JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology
Corp. transcend storejet 25P",
"rating" : "****"
}
},
}
Note that I've used JSON format. I'm a bit worried about this: I would
have preferred to have no dependencies. But as written the scripts do
depend on the JSON module.
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