Hardware Detection ------------------ We want to do hardware detection in the Debian installer. What types of hardware is it worthwhile for the installer to detect? - hard drive (ide, scsi) - CDROM drive (for CD installs) - CPU (if we want to try to install a kernel that matches the cpu better than a i386 kernel on a pentium 3) - NIC (for network installs) - modem (for modem installs) - pcmcia (hard drive, memory, NIC. Mostly handled by the pcmcia drivers, tho) Ideally, code for detecting a given type of hardware should not be wasting space on an install media unless that type of hardware is supported. So a dedicated floppy and ethernet installer should not have to worry about modem and cdrom detection code. This suggests that various detection bits should be in separate modules. We want to offer three levels of detection, and allow the user to chose which is suitable: - full detection - passive detection (no probing) - no detection We are using discover for hardware detection, which works well, also on non-i386. Discover 2.x will also support *BSD and such better.