HW PROBE 1.6

Hardware Probe Tool (hw-probe) — a tool to probe for hardware, check operability and find drivers with the help of Linux hardware database: https://linux-hardware.org

For BSD users: https://bsd-hardware.info

Contents

• About
• Install
• Usage
• Review
• AppImage
• Docker
• Live CD/USB
• Snap
• Flatpak
• Inventory
• Monitoring
• Periodic run
• Offline view
• ACPI dump
• Operability
• Disable logs
• Privacy
• License

About

Probe — is a snapshot of your computer's hardware state and logs. The tool checks operability of devices by analysis of logs and returns a permanent url to view the probe of the computer.

Share your probes and logs with Linux/BSD developers in order to debug and fix problems on your computer. Simplify inventory of hardware in your company. Please read more in our blog.

If some of your computer devices doesn't work due to a missed driver then the tool will suggest a proper Linux kernel version according to the LKDDb or third-party drivers.

Sample probe: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=b394035f90

You can create a probe of your computer with the help of AppImage, Docker, Snap, Flatpak, Live CD/USB or RPM/Deb package.

By creating probes you contribute to the "HDD/SSD Desktop-Class Reliability Test" study: https://github.com/linuxhw/SMART

Install

You can probe your computer by AppImage, Docker, Snap, Flatpak or Live CD/USB.

Also you can install a native package (RPM, Deb, Pkg, etc.) for your Linux distribution or install from source. See install instructions in the INSTALL.md file.

See install instructions for BSD in the INSTALL.BSD.md file.

Usage

Create a probe:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload

Review

You can adjust device statuses in your probe and leave comments. Look for big green REVIEW button on the probe page.

Look for 'Export template to forum' link at the bottom of the probe page to generate BBCode review template to post on your favorite forum. Please consider to post your reviews to Linux Hardware Review forum.

AppImage

The portable app that runs anywhere (with glibc >= 2.17), no need to install anything. Just download hw-probe-1.6.5-189-x86_64.AppImage and run the following command in terminal to probe your computer:

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

You may need to install fuse-libs or libfuse2 package if it is not pre-installed in your Linux distribution to run appimages. Try old AppImage if you have troubles to run the latest image (e.g. on ancient Linux distributions with glibc < 2.17).

Supported systems

The old AppImage runs on all 64-bit Linux distributions with Glibc >= 2.14 including:

• Ubuntu 12.04 and newer
• Linux Mint 13 and newer
• Debian 8 and newer
• openSUSE 12.0 and newer
• Manjaro 0.8 and newer
• MX Linux 14 and newer
• ROSA Linux R1 and newer
• elementary OS 0.2 and newer
• Fedora 15 and newer (need to add fuse-libs package on Fedora 15, 16 and 17)
• RHEL 7 and newer
• CentOS 7 and newer
• Solus 3 and newer
• Puppy Linux 6.0 and newer (Tahr64, XenialPup64, BionicPup64, etc.)
• Clear Linux of any version
• Arch Linux of any version
• EndeavourOS 2019 and newer
• Pop!_OS 17 and newer
• Mageia 2 and newer
• Alt Linux 7 and newer
• Gentoo 12 and newer
• Sabayon 13 and newer
• Slackware 14.2 and newer
• OpenMandriva 3.0 and newer

Docker

You can easily create a probe on any Linux distribution without installing the tool with the help of the Docker image:

sudo -E docker run -it \
-v /dev:/dev:ro \
-v /lib/modules:/lib/modules:ro \
-v /etc/os-release:/etc/os-release:ro \
-v /var/log:/var/log:ro \
--privileged --net=host --pid=host \
linuxhw/hw-probe -all -upload

You may need to run xhost +local: before docker run to collect X11 info (xrandr, xinput, etc.).

Docker hub repository: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxhw/hw-probe/

Live CD

If the tool is not pre-installed in your system or you have troubles with installing the tool or its dependencies (e.g. hwinfo is not available in the repository) then try one of the following Live images with hw-probe pre-installed: Debian, ArcoLinux or OpenMandriva.

Write the image to USB or CD drive, boot from it on your computer and create a probe (see Usage).

Snap

Install the universal Linux package:

sudo snap install hw-probe

The hw-probe command should become available on the command line after installation. If not, try:

export PATH=$PATH:/snap/bin

Connect block-devices interface to check SMART attributes of drives:

sudo snap connect hw-probe:block-devices :block-devices

Now you can create computer probes:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload

Note: You need a Snap runtime (snapd package) and /snap symlink to /var/lib/snapd/snap (by sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap) in your system to install and run snaps (pre-installed on Ubuntu 16.04 and newer).

Snap Store

The app is available in the Snap Store: https://snapcraft.io/hw-probe

This is a strict snap that runs in a sandbox with limited functionality. Please enable Access to disk block devices in Permissions in order to check SMART attributes of your drives.

Supported systems

See list of supported Linux distributions and installation instructions here: https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd

The list of supported Linux distributions includes:

• Ubuntu 14.04 and newer
• Debian 9 and newer
• Fedora 26 and newer
• Solus 3 and newer
• Zorin 12.3 and newer

Flatpak

Add a remote:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Install universal package:

flatpak install flathub org.linux_hardware.hw-probe

Now you can create computer probes:

flatpak run org.linux_hardware.hw-probe -all -upload

Run it as root if you want to check your hard drives health.

App Center

Find the Hardware Probe application in your App Center (GNOME Software), install it and click on the desktop icon to create a probe. Enable Flatpak plugin (gnome-software-plugin-flatpak package for Debian/Ubuntu) and install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo if needed.

Flathub

The app is available in the Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.linux_hardware.hw-probe

Supported systems

Out of the box:

• Endless OS 3 and newer
• Linux Mint 18.3 and newer
• Fedora 27 and newer
• CentOS 7.6 GNOME and newer
• Pop!_OS 20.04 and newer

Need to setup Flatpak (https://flatpak.org/setup/):

• elementary OS 5 and newer
• Pop!_OS 18.04 and newer
• Solus 3 and newer
• Clear Linux of any version
• Mageia 6 and newer
• openSUSE Leap 15 and newer
• RHEL 7.6 and newer
• Arch Linux
• Chrome OS

Inventory

Since hw-probe 1.5.

Request inventory ID:

hw-probe -generate-inventory -email YOUR@EMAIL

Mark your probes by this ID:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload -i ID

Find your computers by the inventory ID on this page: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=computers

The Email is needed to get notifications if hardware failures are detected on your computer in future probes.

Monitoring

LHWM — Linux Hardware Monitoring (c) allows you to monitor most kinds of hardware-related changes (operating system failures, configuration changes and degradation of hardware components) on all your Linux servers or personal stations with E-mail notifications. The service protects your cluster from unexpected hardware failures by regular hardware probing and monitoring of system logs for failures with the help of the Linux-Hardware.org knowledge base.

All you need is to generate your personal inventory ID (if you don't have it yet) and start monitoring of each server by one simple command line:

sudo -E hw-probe -start -i INVENTORY_ID

The command will add a daily cron job to make a probe of the server and you'll be notified by E-mail in the case of hardware failures or important hardware-related changes detected.

Periodic run

If your distribuition is running under systemd and you want to generate and upload hw-probe report periodically, please install:

cp -a periodic/hw-probe.{service,timer} $(systemdsystemunitdir)/

Normally systemd units dir is located at /usr/lib/systemd/system. You may want to get systemd unit dir by running pkg-config --variable=systemdsystemunitdir systemd

Enable hw-probe.timer by running:

systemctl enable --now hw-probe.timer

This timer will execute one time per month a hw-probe.service that will generate and upload report to the database.

User may edit hw-probe.timer and change OnCalendar value to execute hw-probe report on different time period (yearly, semiannually, quarterly, etc.). Values lower than month are STRONGLY not recommended.

ACPI dump

Dump and decode ACPI table:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload -dump-acpi -decode-acpi

NOTE: acpica-tools package should be installed

Operability

The tool checks operability of devices on board by analysis of collected log files.

*The 'fixed' status is manually assigned by users during probe review.

You can perform additional operability sanity tests by the following command:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -check -upload

The following tests are executed:

• graphics test by glxgears for both integrated and discrete graphics cards (requires mesa-demos package to be installed)
• drive read speed test by hdparm for all HDDs and SSDs
• CPU performance test by dd and md5sum
• RAM memory test by memtester

Execution time is about 1 min for average modern desktop hardware. You can execute particular tests using appropriate options: -check-graphics, -check-hdd, -check-cpu and -check-memory.

Disable logs

You can disable collecting of unwanted logs by the -disable A,B,C,... option.

For example, to disable collecting of xdpyinfo and xorg.conf run:

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload -disable xdpyinfo,xorg.conf

Privacy

We do our best to decorate all private information (including the username, machine's hostname, IP addresses, MAC addresses, UUIDs and serial numbers) before uploading to the database. Be aware that this may fail in certain edge cases.

The tool uploads 32-byte prefix of salted SHA512 hash of MAC addresses and serial numbers to properly identify unique computers and hard drives. UUIDs are decorated in the same way, but formatted like regular UUIDs in order to save readability of logs. All the data is uploaded securely via HTTPS.

License

This work is dual-licensed under LGPL 2.1 (or any later version) and BSD-4-Clause. You can choose between one of them if you use this work.

SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1-or-later OR BSD-4-Clause

Enjoy!