Check hardware compatibility

Note: This article is related to bare-metal Alpine installations. This is not for Alpine installed in any virtual environment (Docker, VZ container or VM).

There is an easy and quick method to check all hardware devices on the motherboard for Linux-compatibility with the help of recently added hw-probe package in Edge/Testing. The tool checks operability of hardware devices by analysis of logs and tries to find missed drivers with the help of LKDDb.

Install

The package can be installed from edge/testing repository by the following command:

# apk add --no-cache -X http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing hw-probe

Check hardware

Note: Private information (including the username, machine's hostname, IP addresses, MAC addresses and serial numbers) is NOT uploaded to the database. The tool uploads 32-byte prefix of salted SHA512 hash of MAC addresses and serial numbers to properly identify unique computers and hard drives. All the data is uploaded securely via HTTPS.

Tip: If you are security paranoid try to run Docker image or Flatpak app instead of the apk package to restrict access to meaningful system resources.

Use this command:

hw-probe -all -upload

Sample output:

   Probe for hardware ... Ok
   Reading logs ... Ok
   Uploaded to DB, Thank you!
   Probe URL: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=43a8c9674e

Now follow the link to check if everything is fine according to the hardware knowledge base.