This section provides essential command-line tools for retrieving detailed hardware information on your system. Understanding your hardware is crucial for troubleshooting, performance optimization, and system management.

System Hardware Details

The lshw command is a powerful utility that provides a comprehensive overview of your system's hardware configuration. It lists details about the CPU, memory, storage devices, network interfaces, and more.

# To display all hardware details:
sudo lshw

Kernel Modules Management

Kernel modules are pieces of code that can be loaded and unloaded into the kernel on demand. The following commands help you manage and inspect them.

# To list currently loaded kernel modules:
lsmod

# To list all available modules:
find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type f -iname "*.ko"

# To load a module:
modprobe <module>

# To remove a module:
modprobe -r <module>

PCI Devices Information

The lspci command displays information about PCI buses and devices connected to them. This is useful for identifying specific hardware components like graphics cards, network cards, and sound cards.

# To list devices connected via pci bus:
lspci

# To debug output for pci devices (hex):
lspci -vvxxx

CPU and Memory Statistics

Accessing the /proc filesystem provides direct insights into your CPU and memory hardware statistics.

# To display cpu hardware stats:
cat /proc/cpuinfo

# To display memory hardware stats:
cat /proc/meminfo

Kernel Ring Buffer and Messages

The dmesg command is used to display the kernel ring buffer messages, which are essential for diagnosing boot-time issues and hardware problems.

# To output the kernel ring buffer:
dmesg

# Ouput kernel messages
dmesg --kernel

External Resources

• lshw man page
• lsmod documentation
• PCI IDs database