Hardware compatibility

History¶

A common question people have is "Will Rocky install on my machine?" It is an important question and generally the answer is "yes." However, the question becomes more challenging when it is "Will Rocky work with this device or setup?" At the beginning of the project, Testing Team needed as many reports as possible to know that Rocky did indeed install on a wide range of hardware. xsos scraped this information together and put into the Git repository here.

At the time it worked well however, it was hard to contribute to, and it was hard to search and filter. There have been no updates to these reports in years.

However, the questions of "Does Rocky install on...?" Are still valid questions as there is a constant release of new hardware all the time. Thus, there is a desire to help build a database that users can search and contribute to.

Hardware Probe project¶

The Hardware Probe project set out to answer this question. It is an established project with a website that users can use to search for hardware and systems. Additionally, there are numerous ways to install the probe and submit results easily and anonymously. The hw-probe tool analyzes and collects outputs from a number of utilities, such as lspci, smartctl, and hwinfo, to verify hardware and check for the proper loading and optimal functionality of drivers before submitting to the database.

Here is an example of a system that has multiple items useful for Testing Team purposes.

Why contribute¶

There are three reasons why Testing Team would like you to contribute your system to the Hardware Probe project database:

Whether you are running Rocky or some other distribution, helping the Hardware Probe project helps all Linux users know if their hardware is supported and works under Linux. It is good for the larger community.
It builds a database for the community who has the question "Does Rocky install on ...?". Contributing your hw-probe results to the database helps answer this question. The more variations and contributions, the more helpful the database is for others using EL based distributions like Rocky Linux.
Sometimes drivers change upstream from Rocky, and even drop entirely. It helps the Rocky Testing Team to know and more quickly address concerns about hardware where drivers should be working but for some reason are no longer functional in newer releases. If a piece of hardware previously worked and no longer does, we might not have access to that hardware, which can make it challenging to find release notes if the hardware was deprecated, or in filing upstream bug reports if it should be supported. The more history of the hardware Testing Team has available to reference, the easier and quicker it is to help address the issue.

How to contribute¶

Fortunately for Rocky Linux, the hw-probe tool is available in EPEL except for Rocky Linux 10 (yet). This is not a complete comprehensive guide on how to use this tool. There are a number of useful features built-in that are not covered below. Here we are only covering the features needed to install and upload to the database.

Rocky 8 and Rocky 9¶

Install EPEL if you have not done so already:

dnf install -y epel-release

Install hw-probe:

sudo dnf install -y hw-probe

Do note, the EPEL package does not always get dependencies.

For all versions, you need to install these packages:

sudo dnf install -y tar curl

On Rocky 8, also install xorg-x11-utils for edid-decode [Note: this package is not available for 9/10; ignore the warning]:

sudo dnf install -y xorg-x11-utils

Run the probe and upload the results:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload

Rocky 10¶

For Rocky 10, at the time of this writing hw-probe, is not in the main EPEL repository, but there is work on building it. In the mean time, the easiest way to get hw-probe with least amount of dependency packages to install, is to download and use the AppImage. Check the link for the latest version. Examples below use 1.6.5-189.

You need to install the libxcrypt-compat package:

sudo dnf install -y libxcrypt-compat

Finally make the AppImage executable:

chmod +x ./hw-probe-1.6.5-189-x86_64.AppImage

Run the probe and upload the results:

sudo -E ./hw-probe-1.6.5-189-x86_64.AppImage -all -upload

Notify the Testing team¶

If running the probe on a official release (at the time of this writing: 8.10, 9.7, 10.1), submit the result to the Testing Team via chat.rockylinux.org (Mattermost Chat) in the testing channel. This is only recommended and not required. It simply lets Testing Team know what hardware you submitted and the current state of it with Rocky. There is a lot of value for the larger community and for Testing Team historical purposes (knowing if hardware did or did not work on previous releases).

If running the probe on a Release Candidate or Beta, it is important to report the link regardless of status to chat.rockylinux.org (Mattermost Chat), in the release channel. If that is not possible, direct message Rocky Linux on your social media of choice, or post in the forums at forums.rockylinux.org. Testing Team cannot guarantee your name will appear in the credits for submissions outside of the Mattermost channels at chat.rockylinux.org, but we will do our best to include ALL those who give submissions.

Additional ways to contribute¶

It would be amazing to have hw-probe fully added into EPEL for 10, and for as many architectures as possible. Anyone with EPEL experience willing to assist there would be greatly appreciated. You can review the upstream bug-report here or follow along with the Testing Team's issue.

Additionally, anyone willing to contribute to the Hardware Probe project would be of great help. They are looking for people to assist with writing tests and managing the project.

Lastly, anyone willing to assist by coming up with a good method where Testing Team can review all of the Rocky submissions without overloading the upstream database would be greatly appreciated.

Author: Chris Stackpole

Contributors: Steven Spencer