Hwinfo (8) Linux Manual Page

hwinfo – probe for hardware

Synopsis

hwinfo [ OPTIONS ]

Description

hwinfo is 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.

Options

Note that running hwinfo without any options is roughly equivalent to ‘hwinfo –all –log=-‘.

–<HARDWARE_ITEM>

This option can be given more than once. Probe for a particular HARDWARE_ITEM. Available hardware items are:

all, arch, bios, block, bluetooth, braille, bridge, camera, cdrom, chipcard, cpu, disk, dsl, dvb, fingerprint, floppy, framebuffer, gfxcard, hub, ide, isapnp, isdn, joystick, keyboard, memory, modem, monitor, mouse, netcard, network, partition, pci, pcmcia, pcmcia-ctrl, pppoe, printer, redasd, reallyall, scanner, scsi, smp, sound, storage-ctrl, sys, tape, tv, uml, usb, usb-ctrl, vbe, wlan, xen, zip

–short

Show only a summary. Use this option in addition to a hardware probing option.

–listmd

Normally hwinfo does not report RAID devices. Add this option to see them.

–only DEVNAME

This option can be given more than once. If you add this option, only data about devices with DEVNAME will be shown.

–save-config SPEC

Store config for a particular device below /var/lib/hardware. SPEC can be a device name, an UDI, or ‘all’. This option must be given in addition to a hardware probing option.

–show-config UDI

Show saved config data for a particular device.

–map

If disk names have changed (e.g. after a kernel update) this prints a list of disk name mappings. Note that you must have used –save-config at some point before for this can work.

–debug N

Set debug level to N. The debug info is shown only in the log file. If you specify a log file, the debug level is implicitly set to a reasonable value.

–verbose

Increase verbosity. Only together with –map.

–log FILE

Write log info to FILE.

–dump-db N

Dump hardware data base. N is either 0 for the external data base in /var/lib/hardware, or 1 for the internal data base.

–version

Print libhd version.

–help

Print usage.

Environment

hwprobe can hold a comma-separated list of probing flags preceded by ‘+’ or ‘-‘ to be turned on or off. To get a complete list of supported flags, run ‘hwinfo -all’ (note: not ‘–all’) and look at the top of the output.

hwinfo also looks at /proc/cmdline for a hwprobe option.

Examples

– show all disks: hwinfo –disk
– just an overview: hwinfo –short –block
– show a particular disk: hwinfo –disk –only /dev/sdb
– save disk config state: hwinfo –disk –save-config=all
– try 4 graphics card ports for monitor data (default: 3): hwprobe=bios.ddc.ports=4 hwinfo –monitor
– monitor detection runs the Video BIOS to get the monitor data; dump a complete BIOS code execution trace to the log: hwprobe=bios.ddc.ports=1,x86emu=trace:dump:trace.only=0:dump.only=0 hwinfo –monitor –log=foo

Files

/var/lib/hardware/hd.ids: External hardware data base (in readable text form). Try the –dump-db option to see the format.
/var/lib/hardware/udi: Directory where persistent config data are stored (see –save-config option).

Bugs

Not all hardware can be detected.

hwinfo (8) Linux Manual Page