I was involved in a discussion a while back on if the genkernel package could be upgraded to look at some probing results and do an educated guess as to which options need checking. Now, the help usually holds info on which hardware is supported by a certain driver, and an lspci can give you this as well. Now, the output of lspci is at least moderately machine-readable. Does anyone know if a machine-readable database exists mapping kernel drivers to hardware? 

--Daniel Armyr