The Quest Of Finding Linux Compatible Hardware

[allquixotic]

Wow, that sounds really valuable Michael. An empirically-generated HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) for arbitrary distros and configurations.

Of course, the success of the system depends upon three things in particular that I can identify:

(1) People using the system extensively enough that all relevant hardware has been tested. If there aren't enough data points, then it just becomes another search engine that happily says "0 results found".

(2) How heavily can users rely upon the results provided by other users? Maybe there is a misconfiguration, custom software, or a special piece of hardware (e.g. vendor customizations on top of a IHV base chip, especially with e.g. laptop sound systems) that can skew the results. And of course any information that is expected to come from the user, rather than the operating system, is suspect, as users are often wrong about judging what they think their hardware is, intentionally or by accident.

(3) How much detail does the system go into about the things we care about? For example, a gamer will want to know whether graphics card X running driver Y can run game Z with reasonable performance and no rendering artifacts. Just because someone running graphics card X says "it works nice on Ubuntu" doesn't mean, then, that they were using the same driver, or that said driver will be able to run the game you care about. As a particular example, finding a graphics card / driver combo able to run games like Savage 2, Heroes of Newerth, or Unigine games would be an interesting exercise, in a hypothetical future world where some implementations of some Mesa drivers can render these games correctly. Right now it's very cut-and-dry: use Radeon HD4000 or later, or Nvidia G80 or later with the respective proprietary drivers. But in the future it may not be as obvious if r600g starts to support the extensions required by these games.

The value of such a database would be related to the depth of the data gathered, imho. Very general comments like "Works" (as in other HCLs) is almost completely useless in the case of complex hardware like GPUs, where you can say "Works" to some degree if it can start X -- and that's true for every card supported by vesa. And sometimes performance isn't the most important issue, either: I don't care if I can get 500 fps in a "benchmark" of Unigine, if all the effects aren't rendered and half the textures are black. Driver implementations can, and very often do, process API calls incorrectly without crashing or otherwise reporting an error, even if the resulting image is partially or completely messed up. Incorrect rendering is as damning, if not more damning, than bad performance. Automatically detecting correct rendering (or, alternatively, relying upon the user to report rendering issues) should become a crucial input for reporting results to the database.

[lopho]

You could get amazon.de (germany) to work as well
Then you'll have at least one (or 2 if you count Austria) Euro countries.

I guess amazon.de will have a similar, if not the same, api as uk/us amazon.

[Michael]

Michael: In price comparisons, please also consider non-US users. Most benchmark sites *cough*anandtech*cough*tom's hardware*cough* tend to forget we exist. We don't use dollars, don't have access to newegg, and don't have rebates. So a very valid price comparison or guide in the US is normally not applicable in Europe or other places in the world.

I think I can get Amazon UK/etc supported, but for anything else I need to be informed of such foreign stores that have affiliate setups and pricing APIs. Nothing on OpenBenchmarking.org is manually pulled.

[LinuxID10T]

<---- EXACTLY. Be careful people, on most optimus laptops having the nvidia chip is basically the same as having a rock weighting the same.

Michael: In price comparisons, please also consider non-US users. Most benchmark sites *cough*anandtech*cough*tom's hardware*cough* tend to forget we exist. We don't use dollars, don't have access to newegg, and don't have rebates. So a very valid price comparison or guide in the US is normally not applicable in Europe or other places in the world.

Well, isn't it better it works for some of us rather than none of us at all?

[[Knuckles]]

Does Optimus work under Linux? I thought Nvidia made it clear that they would not support it.

<---- EXACTLY. Be careful people, on most optimus laptops having the nvidia chip is basically the same as having a rock weighting the same.

Michael: In price comparisons, please also consider non-US users. Most benchmark sites *cough*anandtech*cough*tom's hardware*cough* tend to forget we exist. We don't use dollars, don't have access to newegg, and don't have rebates. So a very valid price comparison or guide in the US is normally not applicable in Europe or other places in the world.

[pingufunkybeat]

The quest for Linux-compatible hardware is actually quite simple:

* Get an NVidia graphics card.

That's all there is to it

Does Optimus work under Linux? I thought Nvidia made it clear that they would not support it.

[fernandoc1]

Hey seen that article I had the following idea:
You can display the performance of different combinations of hardware using PTS. You should also benchmark hardware comparing Windows and Linux performance.
With this, users may have an idea of what hardware they will be buying.
Meanwhile you could threat bad hardware vendors like SiS and Via, sending them the following message: "Hey VIA/SiS look at these benchmarks, see how NVIDIA, Intel and AMD give good results in our tests. Have you realized that your hardware aren' t there? Can you guess why?"
This should make them fell very envy about not seeing their hardware in the recommended list.
You could also create a list of the hardware that should be avoided.
Printers, scanners and every other hardware should be also available.

[Michael]

Thats a great use of the data generated from the PTS. Could help a lot of people determining what wifi chips are actually best supported. But how do you benchmark something like soundcards? People want to know if spdif out is working with some random application for example.

I haven't looked much into sound card support yet, but one rough estimate for that could be to look at the percent of people using a given sound card relative to other audio adapters, at least as a cursory way to see if something looks to be possibly supported well or not. And then use the commenting system to ask the active owners.

[Michael]

Well, sometimes you have to be careful about what network adapter or printer/scanner you get, but I guess that's not the kind of hardware Michael was referring to.

There is yet-to-be-announced support for USB devices. Wait, did I just say that?

[crispy]

Thats a great use of the data generated from the PTS. Could help a lot of people determining what wifi chips are actually best supported. But how do you benchmark something like soundcards? People want to know if spdif out is working with some random application for example.