linuxexpert-practice-labs/labs/linux-plus/1-2-2-hardware-inventory

Linux+ 1.2.2: Finding out about hardware

An inventory of the VM's hardware, the kernel's messages as a device appears, and PCI devices that no driver has claimed.

Before you start

The lab sets nothing up. Tasks 1 and 3 ask for findings: write them to the files in /root/lab-answers/ that the tasks name.

Tasks

1. Build a quick inventory of this VM with lscpu, lsmem, lspci, lsusb, lshw and dmidecode. The "hardware" is the hypervisor's: write the system manufacturer that dmidecode reports (such as QEMU) to /root/lab-answers/1.
2. Run dmesg -w in one terminal, then attach a USB device or a new virtual disk to the VM, and watch the kernel's messages. Not graded.
3. Find every PCI device without a driver, and write their slot addresses (such as 00:00.0), one per line, to /root/lab-answers/3. If there are none, write none.

Hints

• Minimal RHEL-family installs need pciutils and usbutils for lspci and lsusb.
• dmidecode -t system, or dmidecode -s system-manufacturer.
• A device that a driver has claimed has a driver link in sysfs: for d in /sys/bus/pci/devices/*; do [ -e "$d/driver" ] || lspci -s "${d##*/}"; done