[vox] SuSE Bloat

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006, Micah J. Cowan wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 04:08:47PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > On Thu, 02 Feb 2006, Bob Scofield wrote:
> > > I have read that Debian does not have the hardware recognition
> > > that SuSE has.
> > 
> > The hardware recognition is really a function of the kernel, so
> > Debian will recognize any hardware that the kernel itself will
> > support.
> 
> I don't think so. The kernel generally doesn't handle hardware
> detection directly, only hardware support.

The kernel[1] does both; modules which are loaded figure out if they
can handle any of the available hardware.

> Some modules will auto-detect whether their presence is helpful; but
> for some things this isn't practical/possible/implemented.

All modules have to detect[2] the hardware that they are actually
capable of supporting, otherwise they're just plain broken.

> It's mainly a question of determining which modules to throw into
> the kernel in the first place.

We build (almost) all of the modules as modules.

Now, if you're talking about things like whether discover, hotplug, or
udev will figure out which module is the right module to load, that's
really a function of their PCI ID database. Thankfully, that
information is shared through most of the distributions, so assuming
your hardware predates the version of the database, it should pose no
problem. [Otherwise, you can load the module using modconf, or use the
etch d-i, which has newer versions of discover et al.]


Don Armstrong

1: Well, the modules in the kernel, anyway.

2: In the sense that they cannot try to drive any arbitrary piece of
hardware in your box...
-- 
CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US
forces have swooped on an Iraqi Primary School and detained 6th Grade 
teacher Mohammed Al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested,
Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square and
a calculator. US President George W Bush argued that this was clear
and overwhelming evidence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of maths 
instruction.

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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