hwinfo

Overview

hwinfo/libhd are used to probe for the hardware present in the system. It can be used to generate a system overview log which can be later used for support.

This project provides a hardware probing library libhd.so and a command line tool hwinfo using it. A major project using this library is YaST, the SUSE installation tool.

To give you an idea what kind of information it provides, here's the output it gives when asked about the graphics card:

# hwinfo --gfxcard
27: PCI 200.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)
  [Created at pci.378]
  Unique ID: B35A.G9ppNwS+xM4
  Parent ID: _Znp.nMBktMhAWbC
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/0000:02:00.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:02:00.0
  Hardware Class: graphics card
  Model: "nVidia GF119 [NVS 310]"
  Vendor: pci 0x10de "nVidia Corporation"
  Device: pci 0x107d "GF119 [NVS 310]"
  SubVendor: pci 0x10de "nVidia Corporation"
  SubDevice: pci 0x094e
  Revision: 0xa1
  Driver: "nvidia"
  Driver Modules: "nvidia"
  Memory Range: 0xfa000000-0xfaffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xf0000000-0xf7ffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xf8000000-0xf9ffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  I/O Ports: 0xe000-0xefff (rw)
  Memory Range: 0xfb000000-0xfb07ffff (ro,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  IRQ: 82 (3241635 events)
  I/O Ports: 0x3c0-0x3df (rw)
  Module Alias: "pci:v000010DEd0000107Dsv000010DEsd0000094Ebc03sc00i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: nouveau is not active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe nouveau"
  Driver Info #1:
    Driver Status: nvidia is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe nvidia"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
  Attached to: #9 (PCI bridge)

Primary display adapter: #27

If that's a bit too much information, you can ask it also for an abbreviated form. For example:

# hwinfo --short --disk --cdrom
disk:
  /dev/sda             WDC WD10EARS-00Y
  /dev/sdb             ST2000DM001-1CH1
cdrom:
  /dev/sr0             PLDS DVD+-RW DS-8ABSH

You can influence libhd via the hwprobe environment variable resp. the hwprobe boot option. This includes turning on or off probing modules and also manually adding hardware devices (to some degree).

For example

export hwprobe=-bios

will turn off the bios probing module.

For details about hwprobe look here.

For general usage instructions, see hwinfo manual page.

Note

hwinfo has a legacy interface, accepting hwprobe-like options as command argument (For example hwinfo -bios - note the single '-'). Please don't do this. If you are interested, you can read about it here.

Technical documentation

The hardware detection library makes use of a number of technical specifications.

Here is a compilation of external links to technical standards relevant to libhd.

openSUSE Development

To build the library, simply run make. Install with make install.

Basically every new commit into the master branch of the repository will be auto-submitted to all current SUSE products. No further action is needed except accepting the pull request.

Submissions are managed by a SUSE internal jenkins node in the InstallTools tab.

Each time a new commit is integrated into the master branch of the repository, a new submit request is created to the openSUSE Build Service. The devel project is system:install:head.

For maintained branches, the package is submitted to a devel project but the final submission must be triggered manually.

*.changes and version numbers are auto-generated from git commits, you don't have to worry about this.

The spec file is maintained in the Build Service only. If you need to change it for the master branch, submit to the devel project in the build service directly.

The current names of the devel projects for other branches can be seen in the jenkins logs.

Development happens mainly in the master branch. The branch is used for all current products.

In rare cases branching was unavoidable:

• branch sl_11.1: SLE 11 SP4
• branch sle12: SLE 12 (not SPx)

You can find more information about the changes auto-generation and the tools used for jenkis submissions in the linuxrc-devtools documentation.

Updating Database for Pci and Usb Ids

For details about updating pci and usb ids look here.