Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO Steven Pritchard Southern Illinois Linux Users Group (http://www.silug.org/) / K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc. (http://www.kspei.com/)
[email protected] 3.2.4 Copyright © 2001-2007 Steven Pritchard Copyright © 1997-1999 Patrick Reijnen 2007-05-22 This document attempts to list most of the hardware known to be either supported or unsupported under Linux. 1. Introduction This document lists most of the hardware components (not whole computers) known to be supported or not supported under Linux, so reading through this document you can choose the components for your own Linux computer and know what to avoid. As the list of components supported by Linux changes constantly, this document will never be complete. If a component is not mentioned in this HOWTO, I simply have not found support for the component and nobody has told me about support. Subsections titled ’Alpha, Beta drivers’ list hardware with alpha or beta drivers in varying degrees of usability. Note that some drivers only exist in alpha kernels, so if you see something listed as supported but isn’t in your version of the Linux kernel, upgrade. 1.1. Notes on binary-only drivers Some devices are supported by binary-only modules; avoid these when you can. Binary-only modules are modules which are compiled for ONE kernel version. The source code for these modules has NOT 1 Hardware-HOWTO been released. This may prevent you from upgrading or maintaining your system. It will also prevent you from using the component on alternate (usually non-x86) architectures. Linus Torvalds says “I allow binary-only modules, but I want people to know that they are _only_ ever expected to work on the one version of the kernel that they were compiled for.” (See http://lwn.net/1999/0211/a/lt-binary.html for the rest of the message.) 1.2.