Martin Schwenke

Linux hardware inventory: Current reality, future possibilities

Abstract

The lsvpd and lscfg commands are used on AIX® systems to list interesting information about the hardware that makes up a system. These commands have been partially reverse-engineered and reimplemented for Linux® running on PowerPC®. The Linux versions have reached a point where they are likely to provide useful information for an IBM service engineer who is familiar with the AIX commands, but comes across a pSeries® machine that is running Linux.

The first part of this paper covers progress so far: the early days of the project - this should take a few hours; a Perl prototype - Perl probably isn't available early enough it the boot sequence, so we'll call it a prototype; more experiments in C and Bourne shell - success at last; and packaging issues - would you like find with that?

The second part of this paper covers possible futures: including cross-architecture hardware inventory and device-naming. Some of this involves changing the direction of various parts of the project and looking at areas that are outside the scope of the project.

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