Ubuntu Wiki

This page provides info about new automated hardware database, how to use it and how to add your hardware to the database.

The project is the successor of the Smolt project.

About

Nowadays, Linux hardware compatibility is almost perfect compared to the 90s. However, according to the latest report from Linux-Hardware.org about 20% of Linux users still facing hardware compatibility problems. Most of them (79%) have only one unsupported device on board, some of them (18%) have two unsupported devices, the minor part of them (2%) have three unsupported devices and the rest (1%) have 4-7 unsupported devices.

The new hardware database is introduced to automatically collect detailed hardware info, collect all necessary hardware related system logs as well for effective debugging, check operability of devices by automated static analysis of collected logs, find drivers for unsupported devices and provide perfect navigation capabilities. Collected logs are depersonalized at the client side.

It's important to have non-Ubuntu probes in the database to reuse experience of other Linux distributions (like Debian) when debugging some computer model or particular hardware parts, so the Ubuntu database is just a part of the global database including all Linux distributions.

The database is dumped to the Github repository for statistical analysis by third parties and to protect against data loss in the future.

The database is closely integrated with LKDDb to immediately suggest a proper (newer) Linux kernel versions for unsupported devices.

Install client

Choose most appropriate way to install:

1. Ubuntu package since 20.04 (https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/hw-probe):

    sudo add-apt-repository universe
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install hw-probe --no-install-recommends

2. Upstream package:

    wget https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe/releases/download/1.5/hw-probe_1.5-1_all.deb
    sudo apt-get install ./hw-probe_1.5-1_all.deb --no-install-recommends

3. Universal packages: AppImage, Docker, Snap, Flatpak

Add your hardware

Use this command:

    sudo -E 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=18c77dc2da

Stats

The latest statistical report on most popular hardware configurations is available here. The statistical report on reliability of desktop-class hard drives is available here.

Privacy

Private info is not collected. See the privacy notes.

Please note that a 32-byte prefix of salted SHA512 hashes of MAC addresses and serial numbers are uploaded to the server in order to properly identify unique computers and parts. These are unlikely to be reversible.

Moreover, it's safer to share your logs by hw-probe rather than share manually, because all private strings are removed at the client side before uploading.

CategoryHardware