hardware incompatibility list was:watchdog timeout

[Peter Jeremy]

On Mon, 2005-Dec-12 14:29:45 -0800, Jim Pazarena wrote:
>What I am getting at, is, that the Hardware Compatibility I am feared
>is woefully out of date.

It does state "Feedback, updates, and corrections to this list are encouraged."

>I suggest that someone should attempt to validate all the listed
>hardware in the recent releases so that the end user (like myself)
>does not get stung spending money on new hardware which isn't
>compatible with newer kernel releases.

I've been bitten by a related problem.  In reality, what you want
can't happen - no-one has the money to buy all the hardware or the
time to test it in all.  A very rough count gives just over 1400
entries in 6.0R/hardware-i386.html.  Add to that vendors' propensity
to totally redesign the hardware without changing the model number
so you still can't be certain that what you just bought as a WizzBang
XY656JT bears any resemblance to the one that was tested.  (Which
could be the problem with your Specialix card).

The real solution is for hardware vendors to either directly support
FreeBSD or provide adequate details to allow someone to independently
write a driver.  The size of the FreeBSD market means that this is
very unlikely to happen in general.

>Perhaps a form can be created for end-users to fill in the blanks
>(or pull-down from the list) to enter which hardware (they/we) are
>using, which OS version, etc, so a new list can be verified? 

This isn't perfect but may help.  There's a similar list maintained
for laptops.  If you believe this is a worthwhile approach, how
about you put something together and announce the URL here.

-- 
Peter Jeremy