Hardware Detection Methods

[bleekerst]

I am interested and have been playing around a bit trying to write a hardware detection module for an installer.

 

With this said I was wondering if I could get some information about what resources are available inside of the bootloader to pass information gained from the boot sequence about the hardware over to the OS running after a cd post / boot. Or if there is some type of built in mechanism that already detects or has the information from the boot process to get the appropriate information to be able to choose the appropriate drivers / kernel / and so-on for installation.

 

I think everyone would agree the most frustrating thing about all of these install images / howtos and so-on is that even after reading through these forums for hours there is still a lot of grey area when it comes to choosing what options to install with. I would like to remedy that and write a hardware detection service to communicate with an installer after post.

 

Can anyone list the what functions are available to be able to take what is detected during the boot process and save this to a file. I don't know the best way to do this is, at this point.

 

I haven't found any documentation about the various bootloaders to know if this is something you would do in the compressed image used in the bootloader or if the OS itself gets enough correct information from the init process to be able to know what hardware is installed in an MacOSX86 installation.

 

Any good help would be great. I would love to share whatever I am able to throw together. I wanted to work on this all weekend and get it written so any resources would be much appreciated. I have looked at the driver api a bit but, this mainly tells me how to create a driver for hardware i know about. I am trying to detect whatever is found via the bios / bootloader process.

 

Anyone interested in helping out, testing, or contributing send me a message and I will setup an irc channel to do some coding over the weekend. My main goal is to put a (no offense) a more professional thought-out installation image / and use some of the tools that seem to been looked over from the OpenDarwin / FreeBSD resources. I think with a good game plan a much more smoother experience could be attained.

 

-bleekerst