Hardware Database (WAS Re: RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!)

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 08:13, Maxwell Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> 	Other Implementation Notes
> 	--------------------------
> 
> 	We have a lot of tools that can get data for us:
> 
> 	lspci, dmidecode, dmesg
> 
> 	What I _don't_ really think would be fun would be parsing the text
> output of those programs. MKJ thought it would be ideal if dmidecode
> could give us XML. Anybody know if there's a tool that already does
> this, or something we could start with? hwbrowser seems to make sense of
> that data somehow -- is there a way to get data out of it? Who's the
> maintainer of hwbrowser?
> 

May I propose to use the freedesktop.org HAL I'm working on? This
project is supposed to be a database of all hardware on the system, see

 http://freedesktop.org/~hal/spec-0.2-pre/hal-spec.html

The HAL will have both hardware details as well as other properties that
may be merged per-device or per-user. For instance this is a HAL device
describing my sound card

 device_id = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pci.00:08.0'
   Bus = 'pci'  (string)
   GotDeviceInfo = false  (bool)
   State = NEED_DEVICE_INFO  (int)
   pci.className = 'Multimedia audio controller'  (string)
   pci.programmingInterface = 0  (0x0)  (int)
   pci.subClass = 1  (0x1)  (int)
   pci.class = 4  (0x4)  (int)
   pci.revision = 16  (0x10)  (int)
   pci.subsysDeviceName = '009e'  (string)
   pci.subsysDeviceId = 158  (0x9e)  (int)
   pci.subsysVendorName = 'Dell Computer Corporation'  (string)
   pci.subsysVendorId = 4136  (0x1028)  (int)
   pci.deviceName = 'ES1978 Maestro 2E'  (string)
   pci.vendorName = 'ESS Technology'  (string)
   pci.deviceId = 6520  (0x1978)  (int)
   pci.vendorId = 4701  (0x125d)   (int)
   pci.function = 0  (0x0)  (int) 
   pci.slot = 8  (0x8)  (int)
   pci.busNumber = 0  (0x0)  (int)

The idea is that Device Info Files can provide more properties. Now, it
would be extremely cool if the hardware database could actually provide
device info files..

Now, HAL is not finished and there are big changes from the 0.1 version,
but I expect to finish version 0.2 late this or early next month. This
version will support USB and PCI devices but it will be very easy to add
new kinds of types such as IEEE1394. HAL will depend only on D-BUS and
expat.

Thanks,
David