I am definitely an outsider, and just a lowly biologist, but YOUR UNIVERSE IS HUGE! I mean, the universe of computer scientists. But its MY UNIVERSE too!? Technically? I live here, and witness it, in all its insane glory.
What I mean to say, There is more hardware in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on your coffee break. So as long as, "ahem", "the free market" is in charge of , "ahem", "innovation", standards will be lax, and new standards will be invented ('ahem", "pushed"), and perfect systems to identify perfect devices in a perfect world will remain elusive.
But, xor, as rich suggested, if it seems simple, give it a whirl.
(I am no coder" but I almost made a useful bash script today. Got hung up on some simple permissions stuff, but I ironed it out by violating Asimov's Laws of Robotics--Androidics?Gynoidics?Anthropoidics? It seems, that if I just neglect the rights of Artificial Life, I can chmod 777 and let the whole world monkey with their code; manipulate their memories? Poor, AI? Can't exist without giving up its freedoms through a simple chmod 777 command! But, then again, many of us Linux freaks are FOSS/GNU/Copyleft freedom fighters, so, permissions all around, I guess?!)
I see the thread has moved for being OT. I blame myself. Here is my code; I tried it out on a fresh piCore11, today, and it works. I added it to my bootlist and filetool and ran the backup command. I don't really know what all that stuff means, but it helps it be persistent. Maybe I could learn that TCZ thing and make it an "extension", or whatever? Here is my code:
#! /bin/bash
cd /
sudo chmod 777 /
mkdir -m 777 /sai/misc
mkdir -m 777 /optic
mkdir -m 777 /aud
mkdir -m 777 /tact
mkdir -m 777 /olf
mkdir -m 777 /gust
Natural intelligence has a "dedicated, standardized", "hardware" (of sorts), determined (partially) by DNA, and thus, cells, tissues, organs, systems, etc.
All the "fun" AI I want to deal with, already knows its hardware, even if I--and my more grandiose, less "driver" software--haven't got a clue.
(I'm so "green" I thought MAC addresses were always hardware specific; i.e. unique identifiers, to specific machines; but I forced two of my pi zeros to have the same ethernet/hw adress/MAC address (twelve hex characters, colon separated pairs) yesterday. Good thing I was alone when I figured it out, because I was kind of embarrassed I didn't know this?)
[Edit: Nope. I checked my notes. I forced one board to have a different ethernet/hwaddr/MACaddr, for two separate sessions. The other board kept its MAcaddr. for several boots. Bad memory; my wet chemistry. Data, data, everywhere, yet not a thought to think!]