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Linux Hardware

Identifying and supporting hardware: inspection commands, drivers and kernel modules, firmware updates, and disk health monitoring.

17 articles

AMD GPUs on Linux: amdgpu, Mesa, Vulkan, and ROCm Explained AMD graphics work out of the box on Linux with fully open source drivers. How the amdgpu kernel driver and Mesa fit together, getting the newest Mesa, Vulkan with RADV, video acceleration, monitoring and fan control, and ROCm for compute and AI. Hardware Video Acceleration on Linux: VA-API in Firefox and Chrome Why video playback makes Linux laptops hot, how VA-API hardware decoding works on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, how to check it with vainfo, and how to confirm Firefox and Chrome are actually using the GPU. Securely Wiping Drives on Linux: shred, SSD Secure Erase, and NVMe Sanitize Why shred works on hard drives but not SSDs, how to wipe a whole HDD, how to use ATA secure erase and NVMe format or sanitize to erase SSDs properly, and why encryption plus key destruction is the most reliable approach. Ventoy Explained: One USB Stick for Every ISO Ventoy turns a USB drive into a boot menu for any number of ISO files: copy ISOs onto it and boot whichever you need. How to install it on Linux, add ISOs, use Secure Boot and persistence, and where it does not work. Firmware Updates on Linux: fwupd, CPU Microcode and Why Order Matters fwupd updates your BIOS, SSD and peripherals from the package manager. CPU microcode is a separate mechanism that loads fresh every boot. One of them can brick hardware, and revisions are not always safe to skip. lm-sensors Explained: Reading Temperatures, Fans and Voltages sensors-detect, what the readings mean, why a laptop reports 95C and is fine, how to tell throttling from a cooling problem, and how to control fan speed when the firmware will let you. Hardware vs Software RAID Why the controller that was supposed to be faster is now usually the liability, what a BBU actually buys you, and where hardware RAID still wins. nvme-cli: Managing and Monitoring NVMe Drives SMART attributes on NVMe live in a different place and speak a different language. nvme-cli reads wear percentage, temperature, and error counts, and handles secure erase and firmware updates. GPU Passthrough with VFIO: Giving a Virtual Machine Real Graphics Hand a physical GPU to a guest for near-native performance in gaming, transcoding, or compute. Here is what IOMMU groups are, why they decide whether it works, and the order to do things in. Bluetooth on Linux: BlueZ, Profiles, and Why Your Headset Sounds Terrible Pairing works, audio quality collapses the moment you use the microphone, and sometimes a device refuses to reconnect. Here is what BlueZ is doing and how to fix the common failures. Printing on Linux: CUPS, IPP Everywhere, and Driverless Setup Printing used to be the worst part of desktop Linux. Driverless IPP changed that for most modern printers, and the remaining problems are usually one specific vendor. Linux Power Management: Getting Real Battery Life From a Laptop Linux battery life used to be noticeably worse than Windows on the same hardware. Most of that gap has closed, and what remains is usually a handful of settings and one badly behaved application. udev Rules Explained: Making Devices Behave the Way You Want Device names are not stable, permissions default to root, and nothing happens automatically when you plug something in unless you tell it to. udev rules fix all three. dmesg Explained: Reading Kernel Messages When Hardware Misbehaves When a disk fails, a USB device does not enumerate, or the kernel kills a process for using too much memory, it says so in the kernel ring buffer. dmesg is how you read it. Kernel Modules Explained: lsmod, modprobe, and DKMS Most drivers on Linux are kernel modules, loaded and unloaded at runtime. Here is how to inspect them with lsmod and modinfo, manage them with modprobe, blacklist the troublesome ones, and understand what DKMS rebuilds. Monitoring Disk Health with smartctl: Reading SMART Before the Drive Dies Every drive tracks its own health through SMART. smartctl reads those attributes, runs self-tests, and, read correctly, gives you warning before a disk fails. Here is what to check and which numbers actually predict death. Hardware Info Commands: lscpu, lsblk, lspci, lsusb, and dmidecode How to inspect your CPU, storage devices, PCI hardware, USB devices, and full system hardware inventory from the Linux command line, without opening a graphical tool.

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