Red Hat Linux hardware discovery tools

RHEL hardware discovery tools

During the Linux kernel loading it discovers the and scans the drivers for a particular Virtual Machine it runs on. After the init procedure linux kernel loads the drivers to support the detected hardware. Examining kernel boot messages is a good way to determine the hardware your are renting for performance issues and simply to know on what "rig" you are working on. 

There are some simple tools I am used to play with to check the current hardware for issues. First one I would like to introduce is the Hardware Abstraction Layer database checker - lshal.

The system output tells us the Bios version of the VM or a physical machine, and serial numbers attached to the same. As we can see this linux kernel is run on a vSphere ESXi virtual machine emulating the Phoenix Technologies bios, which is typical for VMware.

If one wants to get the information about the virtual CPUs or the actual physical ones on their VPS system, this information can be extracted from the /proc folder under the root of the file system.

 From the output of this hardware tool we can see that we are using Genuine Intel two Xeon CPUs. The clock, cache, fpu and family are also displayed so we can get a clear picture of what performance we can expect from this VPS system.

The linux console system can use either the Standard Vga driver, or a video chipset specific modular frame buffer driver. The vga driver is always present in the kernel and will bind automatically to the console if no other is active. To display which driver is used on this particular VPS we can concatenate and display this information from the vtcon0 folder.

[root@cent-01 /]# cat /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon0/name
(S) VGA+
[root@cent-01 /]#

This particular VPS system is using the Standard VGA kernel driver, so we can determine the no other is loaded into the frame.

Thanks for reading. 

Feel free to comment !