Hardware test

So something Bdale came up with this morning at breakfast (and during his talk too, apparently, which I didn't attend) was this idea of a "hardware compatibility test"): a bootable image that hardware vendors could run to see whether their hardware would run Debian. Apparently all the other vendors have it, too, and the lack of it may be one of the main reasons why Debian isn't currently supported by a whole lot of hardware vendors yet.

Such a test wouldn't have to do all that much; just boot the machine (if it can) with the kernel that would be used for the installer and the system that is eventually installed; then run through a check of the available hardware, and finally come up with some kind of score that tells the vendor whether their hardware is supported at all, or if not, what they could do to improve the score.

It seemed to me (and to Mark Hymers, who was seated to my left) that this is something that could be done fairly easily with a slightly modified version of debian-installer. It would be okay if there was a different version for every Debian release we do; and I tend to think it's not even going to be a problem if the first time we don't make the release, but release such a test slighty after the release of Debian.

Having such a test would certainly give hardware vendors an incentive to improve their Debian support, especially if it's a simple thing that they can have some summer student do over all their hardware who'd then store the results in a database of sorts. Or so.

Additionally, if we do this right, we could diversify between 'a wireless driver that will probably work if you load ndiswrapper or something similar' (which would get a score that tells them 'yes, it will run Debian', but no perfect score) and 'a wireless driver that works with free drivers and no additional firmware required' (which would get a perfect score if there's nothing more). By doing this, we would put Debian's collective driving force behind a move to better and more Linux-friendly hardware, which can only be a good thing. Bdale seems to thing this could be an industry-changing thing, and I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work.

Except for one: I'm not sure I'll have the time to work on this myself; and even if I would be sure of that, it's not going to be something that I can do all by myself -- other people would have to run the test on their hardware and communicate the results.

So here's a request: is anyone else interested in this kind of thing? It doesn't sound like something too complicated; and given my business, it surely is something I have a personal interest in, so I will try to make time for it. But I can't do it alone...