What is Lshw?
lshw is a small open source tool for displaying detailed information about the hardware configuration of a Linux system. It can extract and display information about CPU, RAM, devices, bus speed, firmware version, serial numbers, and more.
Some key features of lshw include:
- Displays overview of hardware configuration, including CPU, memory, storage, network, peripherals
- Shows detailed information on specific components like processor, motherboard, graphics card etc.
- Can output in different formats like HTML, JSON, XML, plaintext
- No dependencies other than a basic Linux environment, so works across all distributions
- Open source tool, licensed under the GNU GPL
- Used for hardware inventory & audit, troubleshooting configuration issues, system benchmarking etc.
lshw extracts the hardware information directly from the BIOS via the sysfs filesystem in Linux kernel. So it doesn't need to load any drivers in the background. It works seamlessly across laptops, desktops, servers and virtual machines.