In many cases, the installer will be able to automatically detect your hardware. But to be prepared, we do recommend familiarizing yourself with your hardware before the install.

Hardware information can be gathered from:

Many products work without trouble on Linux. Moreover, hardware support in Linux is improving daily. However, Linux still does not run as many different types of hardware as some operating systems.

Drivers in Linux in most cases are not written for a certain “product” or “brand” from a specific manufacturer, but for a certain hardware/chipset. Many seemingly different products/brands are based on the same hardware design; it is not uncommon that chip manufacturers provide so-called “reference designs” for products based on their chips which are then used by several different device manufacturers and sold under lots of different product or brand names.

This has advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that a driver for one chipset works with lots of different products from different manufacturers, as long as their product is based on the same chipset. The disadvantage is that it is not always easy to see which actual chipset is used in a certain product/brand. Unfortunately sometimes device manufacturers change the hardware base of their product without changing the product name or at least the product version number, so that when having two items of the same brand/product name bought at different times, they can sometimes be based on two different chipsets and therefore use two different drivers or there might be no driver at all for one of them.

For PCI-Express/PCIe devices, a good way to find out on which chipset they are based is to look at their device IDs. All PCI-Express/PCIe devices have so called “vendor” and “product” IDs, and the combination of these two is usually the same for any product based on the same chipset. The traditional s390x I/O layer provides CCW (Channel Command Word) devices, which are DASDs disks, FCP disks and QETH devices (OSA adapters or Hipersockets).

On Linux systems, the devices and their IDs can be read using:

The vendor and product IDs (if available) are usually given in the form of two hexadecimal numbers, seperated by a colon, such as “1d6b:0001”.

An example for the output of lszdev:

dasd-eckd 0.0.160a yes yes dasdb

qeth 0.0.c000:0.0.c001:0.0.c002 yes yes enc600

zfcp-host 0.0.e000 yes yes

zfcp-lun 0.0.e000:0x54320763060b160b:0x4044400200000000 yes yes sda sg1

Whereby 160a indicated an ECKD DASD disk, c000 or the triple c000-c002 a QETH network device (OSA adapter) and e000 and FCP host (bus) adapter, with a WWPN 0x54320763060b160b and LUN 0x4044400200000000.

An example for the output of lspci -nn for a RoCE Express adapter:

0001:00:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Mellanox Technologies MT27500/MT27520 Family [ConnectX-3/ConnectX-3 Pro Virtual Function] [15b3:1004].

The IDs are given inside the rightmost square brackets, i.e. here 15b3 is the vendor- and 1004 is the product ID.

Searching on the internet with the vendor/product ID, “Linux” and “driver” as the search terms often results in information regarding the driver support status for a certain chipset. If a search for the vendor/product ID does not yield usable results, a search for the chip code names, which are also often provided by lspci , can help.

If your computer is connected to a fixed network (i.e. an Ethernet or equivalent connection) which is administered by somebody else, you should ask your network's system administrator for this information:

If the network you are connected to uses DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) for configuring network settings, you don't need this information because the DHCP server will provide it directly to your computer during the installation process.