Smolt: Fedora Hardware Profiler

[Michael Wiktowy]

On 1/31/07, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Hey guys, smolt is in a state now where it can be released and tested
> by the general public.  Currently smolt-firstboot has firstboot
> integration with opt in/out.  My question for the dev's is:
>
> Do we as a community want to include this by default in Fedora 7?
>
> For more information on smolt see:
>
> https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/smolt/wiki
> and
> https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/smolt/wiki/Scope
>
> Current stats can be found at:
>
> http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/stats
>
> You can have your machine send its stats by installing smolt with yum
> and typing "smoltSendProfile"
>
> *Note: this is not LHCP, which is going to be a much larger project.
> Smolt has a much smaller scope and will ultimately (hopefully) be
> replaced by LHCP when it is ready.
>

Does the profile give any indication whether the hardware is installed
and working properly (or providing some limited functionality) or is
it just cataloging its existence?

If it isn't verifying that what is listed is actually functioning as
it should then I don't really see the value of collecting all that
data at first boot. It would be just giving a statistical sampling of
hardware that exists in the world ... however broken it may be on
Linux. It also wouldn't tell you anything about hardware that is so
broken and unsupported that it is not even detected.

It would be far more valuable as an automated tool to send in
consistent data along with a bug report.

If it does do some health/functionality checking of the driver for
hardware then including it in firstboot makes a lot more sense.

/Mike