motherboard autodetect and autoconfig of motherbord specific stuff

[Hans de Goede <j w r degoede hhs nl>]

Hi all,

Lately I've run into some stuff wich needs tweaking to get it 100% which 
is motherboard dependend. Things which (may need) motherboard specific 
tweaks are:
-lm_sensors
-xorg.conf for mainbords with builtin graphics
 (Option "VBERestore" "true" for i810 for example)

So now I'm thinking about creating somekinda hwautodetect and autoconfig 
architecture and program for this.

Questions:
-good/bad idea?
-anyone willing to help?
-how can one detect the exact mainboard (Producer, type, rev)?
 Ideas:
 -memmap the bios, checksum it
 -memmap the bios get identifier string, match to a regex
 -combine the above with PCI id matching for chipset (extra check)
-which motherboardspecific settings can be benefitial?
 So far I have:
 -lm_sensors
 -xorg.conf for mainbords with builtin graphics
  (Option "VBERestore" "true" for i810 for example)
 -onboard sound tweaks??
-what database backend to use?
 preferably one which is already required by the core of most distros
 (This is primarily targeted at Fedora, but I would like to make it
  distro independent if possible)
-what is a good implementation language for this?
 I'm thinking about a C-python mix, C for the detection, python for the
 rest.

Regards,

Hans