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subsystems
submitted by sudoman, 11:31, 31 Agosto 2011
ARGUMENTO: other
ESTADO: opened
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Descripción:

What is the best way to handle subsystems? For instance, according to libreplanet, the "VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] rev 78" card works with free software. I see on http://pciids.sourceforge.net/ that there is a card called "VT6102 [Rhine-II]", and many subsystems listed under it. Is it safe to assume that all of those cards are compatible if we know that one is working?

I read somewhere that in some cases they can have different specifications and therefore require different drivers. Do we need to worry about that? If we want to be cautious, how should we handle these cases, when all we know is that a subsystem or numbered revision unlisted by pciids.sf.net is working?

Mensajes:
tonicucoz:

The problem has been faced some time ago, see here: http://www.h-node.com/issues/view/it/60/1/a716a22ea67968668a01915beeafb1aa and here: http://www.h-node.com/acquisitioncards/talk/en/223/e618ef7a942f379fc771f4513fff6fd5/1/1/undef/undef/undef/undef/undef.

Indeed we are actually listing chipsets, not devices, the devices having the same chipset (what you call subsystems) are grouped inside the same page. We only specify the name of each "subsystem" inside the "possible other name" entry (more or less as pciid do, even if they write also the subcodes: subvendorid and subproductid).

We could say that we are listing all the options listed by lspci and lsusb.

I think it's important to catalogue the lspci and lsusb outputs and say, for each one, if it works or not (if the chipset works or not). After that, sellers often change the name (they create subsystems) so we also add, inside the device page, the other names of that device (that the user will find in a shop)

Since two devices having the same chipset behave in the same way (they both work or not), I think this is a good way to simply the cataloguing process, at least we don't have to verify a lot of codes to assure that a device is really the same (we only check that it has the same chipset)

For example this is the complete code of LifeView FlyVideo 2000: 1131:7130:5168:0138

We divide the devices according to the first part (1131:7130) and we assume that all the "subsystems" (5168:0138) behave at in same way (we only use the "possible other name" entry to distinguish)

submitted by tonicucoz, 12:18, 31 Agosto 2011
tonicucoz:
Anyway if we discover that two subsystems do not behave in the same way we will worry about that :)
submitted by tonicucoz, 12:21, 31 Agosto 2011
sudoman:

Ok, that sounds like a good system. :)

I might be clearer if you listed on the help page that the model name is actually the name of the model family, or chipset name, and that it may not be as advertised. Also another possibility is to ask for the "primary lspci model name" instead of "model name" on the new hw page, although it's not as elegant sounding.

If you want people to list the subsystem name, you could mention lspci -nnv . Or something to that effect.

submitted by sudoman, 12:40, 31 Agosto 2011
tonicucoz:

You can find some explanations here: http://www.h-node.com/wiki/page/en/guidelines-on-how-to-compile-a-hardware-device-page (even if the chipset is not mentioned). We could try to add some explanations to the help page

At the current stage the subsystem name is manually added by the user. Anyway we could think to automate the process thanks to the client, that could read and add the subsystem name

submitted by tonicucoz, 16:55, 1 Septiembre 2011
tonicucoz:
Yes I think we could automatically read the subsystem name from lspci -nnv (with the client) :)
submitted by tonicucoz, 17:00, 1 Septiembre 2011
sudoman:
you could also import the list of subsystems from http://pciids.sourceforge.net , but that might be too much information.
submitted by sudoman, 11:33, 2 Septiembre 2011

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