One of the challenges when using any Operating System is answering the question ‘Is my hardware supported?’. To track this down, you often have to scour Internet sites, hoping someone else has already asked the question, or do other, more horrible machinations – or ask someone like me. If you’re running on an illumos-based system like SmartOS, OmniOS, or OpenIndiana, this just got a lot easier: I’ve created the list. Better yet, I’ve created a tool to automatically create the list.
The List
illumos now has a hardware compatibility list (HCL) available at http://illumos.org/hcl.
This list contains all the PCI and PCI Express devices that should work. If your PCI device isn’t listed there, don’t fret, it may still work. This list is a first strike at the problem of hardware compatibility, so things like specific motherboards aren’t listed there.
How it’s generated
The great thing about this list is that it’s automatically generated from the source code in illumos itself. Each driver on the system has a manifest that specifies what PCI IDs it supports. We parse each of these manifests and look up the names using the PCI ID Database, using a small library that I wrote. From there, we automatically generate the static web page that can be deployed. Thanks to K. Adam White for his invaluable help to stop me from fumbling around too much with front end web code and the others who have already come in and improved it.
All the code is available on github. The goal for all of this is to eventually be a part of the illumos-gate itself. If you have improvements or want to make the web page more visually appealing, we’d all welcome the contribution.