On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 05:21:08PM -0500, Corey Osgood wrote:
> > We had such calls before, and people would send in their board
> > information, assuming that this would be enough for us to support their
> > hardware. Unfortunately not a single new port resulted from this, though
> > many people participated and lots of (unaccomplished) expectations were
> > created. So I carefully wonder what the real goal of such a call would
> > be, except gathering random people with random boards?
>
> Well, that's how I found this place, and that resulted in one port (so
> far) :) But I can very clearly see your point.

What exactly lead you to this project? That would be interesting to
analyze...

My feeling is that a "post your lspci" call for action will result in
lots of lspci's (which is totally useless) and we'll have to tell all
those people "no, your board/chipset is not yet supported". That sucks,
and there's really no gain in doing that.

Now, what I think would indeed be useful is a Call For Developers.
Because that's what we really need, more developers, more man-power
to actually write code to support new chipsets.
Random lspci's from random people don't help at all. We've had tons of
those already and they all end up with "no, it's not supported" answers.


> > Something like:
> > We have 10 people who are willing to work on this or that mainboard if
> > you get them a system they can keep for doing the work, given that the
> > northbridge and southbridge are already supported... Other ideas?

Won't help either. The number of active developers doing new ports is
way less than 10 anyway. Personally I have at least 4-5 board sitting
here which should be relatively easy to support, I'm just lacking the
required spare time.

We need more developers and/or more time.

I don't think money is a problem in most cases (if it is we can probably
arrange for some hardware shipping or ask for donations or something).

The real problems (in my view) are:

1. Lack of developers
2. Lack of time
3. Lack of proper datasheets (for some/many chipsets)

Issue 2 cannot be solved easily, issue 3 depends on many factors
we usually cannot influence a lot, but issue 1 is where we can
get the biggest gain, IMHO.