Thursday, November 01, 2007

Linux Kernel Driver DataBase

This weekend I finally finished the Linux Kernel Driver DataBase . Really I started this project in 2000, but in 2001 after some flames in the LKML (for CML2, the configuration engine used by my project) I put the project in a long hibernation. Now I had some time to finish it.

LKDDb is a database of hardware (and protocols), kernel configuration items and associated kernel driver files. Actually it has nearly 6000 entries (see the statistics). The database is generated automagically, quite fast: it take 2 minutes to scan the whole kernel source, and to interpret it. Unfortunately it is not complete and not accurate (I'm not sure if there is some black-list in kernel, but my scanner cannot distinguish the black-list with the supported hardware list).

Now I'm looking for some application of the database. In 2001 it seemed that there was some interest, but let see.

As a prototype, I dis-hibernate also the AutoKernConf, an automagical kernel configuration. The old version was a more powerful, so I need to forward-port some old features. BTW I changed an other time the project name: autoconfig was too similar to existing projects, kautoconfig, kernfig, kernautoconf were other names, but I like better the new name, and I can use the automagical word in the description ;-)

Do you see other uses of the database?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your job!

Another use of the generated database is building full HCL for the particular kernel. It's needed sometimes. I'm doing this right now for my system.

P.S. including adsense code to all generated pages is a great business idea ;)

cate said...

I was thinking about HCL, but it is a difficult task: I should classify hardware into a better (for human) way, but I don't know so well the current hardware. This is one of the reason I built the web database (so with names and not only ID): I let the search engines to find the relevant pages.

"great business idea": I don't know. There is not so much traffic. Anyway I wanted to learn how google works and to give user an additional service: unfortunately, I see that half of the query are from windows machines, so I think some user doesn't care about linux drivers.

Anonymous said...

> I should classify hardware into a better
> (for human) way, but I don't know so
> well the current hardware.
Why not use device types and human readable classes from Kconfigs?