Hi,
I've been working out a few hardware bugs on a new laptop lately, and I thought it would be interesting to create a specific category/product in the current bugzilla for hardware bugs. Various components could be listed as the different hardware categories (wifi, screen/backlight, trackpad, keyboard, speakers, etc) and this way hardware issues could be tracked separately from software bugs. Hopefully, this would help hardware bugs be resolved faster and it would be a good step forward for getting more computers to work out of the box on a standard Fedora install. Do you think it's worth it?
(Just to clarify, by "hardware bugs" I mean things like missing device IDs from kernel source files, suspend quirks, display backlight control, missing sound, or a component not being detected at all. Devices malfunctioning in Linux due to a driver bug would fall under software bugs IMO)
Stewart
On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 15:33 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
I've been working out a few hardware bugs on a new laptop lately, and I thought it would be interesting to create a specific category/product in the current bugzilla for hardware bugs. Various components could be listed as the different hardware categories (wifi, screen/backlight, trackpad, keyboard, speakers, etc) and this way hardware issues could be tracked separately from software bugs. Hopefully, this would help hardware bugs be resolved faster and it would be a good step forward for getting more computers to work out of the box on a standard Fedora install. Do you think it's worth it?
I'm wondering if this discussion doesn't belong on the cross-distribution list.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 15:33 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
I've been working out a few hardware bugs on a new laptop lately, and I thought it would be interesting to create a specific category/product in the current bugzilla for hardware bugs. Various components could be listed as the different hardware categories (wifi, screen/backlight, trackpad, keyboard, speakers, etc) and this way hardware issues could be tracked separately from software bugs. Hopefully, this would help hardware bugs
To me they would be in firmware, and non-fixable; unless the manufacturer is using loadable firmware to make the device usable. But that is really software in any case...
be resolved faster and it would be a good step forward for getting more computers to work out of the box on a standard Fedora install. Do you think it's worth it?
I'm wondering if this discussion doesn't belong on the cross-distribution list.
Is that because the hw issues tends to hit all distros ?
If there was such a thing, it would be good to base of or link to the smolt hardware database. You have probably seen the bit where you can indicate if your machine's bits work out of the box, with non-free driver, with extra config etc.
For the problem ones, the smolt entry can be used to create a wiki entry where any info {eg workaround, manual load, specific configs can be stored.}. bug tracking pointers could go in here as well.
There is also a more manual hw database on: http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/
The think I like about smolt is that the submission of your machine's bit's IDs is automatic, along with some quick buttons to indicate how well the item worked. It might be nice for a machine side gui app to open your machine's smolt submission, rather than having to know the smoltX CLI stuff.
On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 15:33 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
Hi,
I've been working out a few hardware bugs on a new laptop lately, and I thought it would be interesting to create a specific category/product in the current bugzilla for hardware bugs. Various components could be listed as the different hardware categories (wifi, screen/backlight, trackpad, keyboard, speakers, etc) and this way hardware issues could be tracked separately from software bugs. Hopefully, this would help hardware bugs be resolved faster and it would be a good step forward for getting more computers to work out of the box on a standard Fedora install. Do you think it's worth it?
We're pretty good at pushing things upstream, so maybe you're better off filing bugs directly in the Fedora bugzillas.
I used a tracker in a product that's only available internally to track issues with my Dell Latitude D420[1] when I got it, but it wasn't very useful. You might be better off: - Creating a wiki page for it - Telling sites like tuxmobile about it - and making sure all the issues get filed (maybe with work-arounds in the wiki page itself)
The main point is that all those laptops/machines should work out-of-the-box, so anything that we can do in Fedora to make that better should be taken seriously.
I remember working on various issues for an older Sony Vaio laptop (S1XP) that didn't work that well with FC2. By the time for FC4, everything on it was working out-of-the-box.
Note that Red Hat have a number of people interested in making this work well (hey Richard and Matthew!), so all the fixes, would be upstreamed in due time. It also makes it easier for us to move problems between components (is the backlight not working a kernel, a hal, a hal-info, or an Xorg driver problem?).
(Just to clarify, by "hardware bugs" I mean things like missing device IDs from kernel source files, suspend quirks, display backlight control, missing sound, or a component not being detected at all. Devices malfunctioning in Linux due to a driver bug would fall under software bugs IMO)
Wiki pages with links to bugs is the way to go, and allows us to update easily, and discuss problems related to the device.
[1]: For that laptop, we got the backlight working in HAL, Rfkill support in HAL as well, hints in hal-info for the WWAN driver, and a lot of device driver updates. All of which have been upstreamed.
-
Bastien Nocera -
Development discussions related to Fedora -
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams -
Stewart Adam