Re: Reviving the hardware census

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On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 01:17:50PM -0500, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> The more I look at lshw, the more I'm ambivalent (I'm not against it,
> just not for it either). It certainly collects a lot of relevant
> information. However, I see the following problems.
> 
> 1. lshw tries to make things human readable. This is bad for
> databases. We want to record things like immutable numeric hardware
> IDs rather than the current contents of pci.ids. lshw does provide
> -numeric, but this just adds the numbers to the human readable
> strings.
> 
> 2. lshw collects a lot of data we may not be interested in. For
> example, it reports the four different kinds of floppy disk drives my
> BIOS supports. Also, L1, L2 and L3 cache. There is a bunch of stuff
> like this. Is it useful? Some of it definitely is. But transferring
> unwanted data over the wire is not being a good netizen. Also, some
> people pay for data per MB transferred. We should be respectful.
> 
> 3. lshw supports '-sanitize', but this merely replaces the values with
> '[REMOVED]'. See above for why we don't want to transmit this data.
> 
> 4. lshw reports bus configuration. I'm not sure if this is relevant or
> how we would want to map this data. For example, if Dell uses the same
> hardware in a bunch of laptops then we can deduplicate this to one
> "hardware profile." But if bus configuration is part of this profile,
> then we will have much higher cardinality. If this information is
> important to have, we can make it work. But if not, it would be better
> to try to save storage.
> 
> 5. lshw doesn't seem to have a way to separate "system hardware" from
> "transient hardware." To be fair, this may be impossible. But it would
> be nice to understand the difference between, say, my bluetooth radio
> and my YubiKey. I can't easily remove the former but I can the latter.
> This also goes to cardinality reduction.
> 
> 6. lshw mixes things that are transient with things that are
> permanent. We can remove the timestamps with -notime. But, for
> example, it reports the kernel module currently assigned to a piece of
> hardware. This is probably relevant information, but we will have to
> carefully separate the data based on its lifespan.
> 
> 7. lshw reports virtual NICs as physical ones. We probably don't care
> about this and I certainly don't want to bloat the database with
> everyone's docker subnets unnecessarily.

Again, I was just pointing out a tool we use internally for inventorying our
hardware that I thought might be useful.  If it doesn't work for you, feel
free to choose something else. :-)  I do appreciate the feedback you
provided.  I might work with folks on my team to address some of them as
they could be of benefit for our work too.

Cheers,
Don


> 
> 
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:38 PM, Jeremy Cline <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On 11/09/2017 09:12 AM, Don Zickus wrote:
> >> On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 05:02:05PM -0500, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> >>> It isn't documented in F27, but it does work. However, we probably
> >>> want at least this patch:
> >>> https://github.com/lyonel/lshw/commit/135a853c60582b14c5b67e5cd988a8062d9896f4
> >>
> >> And some beaker stuff looks interesting in
> >>
> >> https://github.com/lyonel/lshw/commit/f95aa917a84a8ee74ce79e9b4f9e198d21a2e4d9
> >>
> >> Regardless.  My overall point was the lshw tool seems to embody a lot of
> >> what you were looking for and thought it could be useful (with some more
> >> fixes) instead of re-inventing the wheel with new plugins. :-)
> >>
> >> Up to you guys.
> >
> > I have no desire to re-invent wheels so I think it makes sense for us to
> > use lshw. Knowing it's being used internally is also good.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Jeremy Cline
> > XMPP: jeremy@xxxxxxxxxx
> > IRC:  jcline
> >
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