pci.ids needs to be kept current in active releases

[Jeff Lane ]

Currently, this is the state of the PCI ID database file in Ubuntu:

$ rmadison pci.ids
 pci.ids | 0.0~2020.03.20-1 | focal | source, all
 pci.ids | 0.0~2021.08.22-1 | impish | source, all
 pci.ids | 0.0~2022.01.22-1 | jammy | source, all

Because of this, focal installations cannot identify PCI devices that were added to the IDs file after March 20, 2020.

As this is just a text file, pci.ids should always be updated with the latest info regardless of release.

This has an effect on MAAS in which any hardware commissioned in MAAS uses a 2 year old version of hte PCIID database and thus cannot identify newer hardware such as the nVidia A100 GPU.

The 2020 version of the file does not contain id's for this while the 2022 version in Jammy does:

12393 20f1 GA100 [A100 PCIe 40GB]

Comparing the current source to the version in focal, there are over 3500 additional or modified IDs in the id file:

$ diff /usr/share/misc/pci.ids pci.ids |wc -l
3529

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that specific release.