lshw Command Examples and Usages

Table Contents

lshw is used to gather hardware information for production hosts, and the article is some useful lshw command examples in Linux. It one of the various Linux hardware troubleshooting tools for everyday Linux system administration.

NAME

lshw

list hardware

SYNOPSIS

lshw [ -version ]

lshw [ -help ]

lshw [ -X ]

lshw [  [ -html ]  [ -short ]  [ -xml ]  [ -json ]  [ -businfo ]  ]  [ -dump filename ]  [ -class class...
]  [ -disable test... ]  [ -enable test... ]  [ -sanitize ]  [ -numeric ]  [ -quiet ]

DESCRIPTION

lshw is a small tool to extract detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or IA-64 systems and on some PowerPC machines (PowerMac G4 is known to work).

It currently supports DMI (x86 and IA-64 only), OpenFirmware device tree (PowerPC only), PCI/AGP, CPUID (x86), IDE/ATA/ATAPI, PCMCIA (only tested on x86), SCSI and USB.

Commands

-version

Displays the version of lshw and exits.

-help

Displays the available command line options and quits.

-X

Launch the X11 GUI (if available).

-html

Outputs the device tree as an HTML page.

-xml

Outputs the device tree as an XML tree.

-json

Outputs the device tree as a JSON object (JavaScript Object Notation).

-short

Outputs the device tree showing hardware paths, very much like the output of HP-UX’s ioscan.

-businfo

Outputs the device list showing bus information, detailing SCSI, USB, IDE and PCI addresses.

-dump filename

Dump collected information into a file (SQLite database).

-class class

Only show the given class of hardware. class can be found using lshw -short or lshw -businfo.

-C class

Alias for -class class.

-enable test
-disable test

Enables or disables a test. test can be dmi (for DMI/SMBIOS extensions), device-tree (for Open‐ Firmware device tree), spd (for memory Serial Presence Detect), memory (for memory-size guessing heuristics), cpuinfo (for kernel-reported CPU detection), cpuid (for CPU detection), pci (for PCI/AGP access), isapnp (for ISA PnP extensions), pcmcia (for PCMCIA/PCCARD), ide (for IDE/ATAPI), usb (for USB devices), scsi (for SCSI) or network (for network interfaces detection).

-quiet

Don’t display status.

-sanitize

Remove potentially sensitive information from output (IP addresses, serial numbers, etc.).

-numeric

Also display numeric IDs (for PCI and USB devices

NOTES

lshw must be run as super user or it will only report partial information.

FILES

/usr/local/share/pci.ids

/usr/share/pci.ids

/etc/pci.ids

/usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids
A list of all known PCI ID’s (vendors, devices, classes and subclasses). If compiled with zlib
support, lshw will look for pci.ids.gz first, then for pci.ids.

/proc/bus/pci/*
Used to access the configuration of installed PCI busses and devices.

/proc/ide/*
Used to access the configuration of installed IDE busses and devices.

/proc/scsi/*, /dev/sg*
Used to access the configuration of installed SCSI devices.

/dev/cpu/*/cpuid
Used on x86 platforms to access CPU-specific configuration.

/proc/device-tree/*
Used on PowerPC platforms to access OpenFirmware configuration.

/proc/bus/usb/*
Used to access the configuration of installed USB busses and devices.

/sys/* Used on 2.6 kernels to access hardware/driver configuration information.