How to Identify the Compatibility of a PCI or USB devices with RHEL Servers?

Hardware is identified during device registration and driver load by the PCI ID. This identifier can be used to search through an existing module database or in-binary module information to supply compatibility  on a given ID.

Supported Module Database information

To Find the Compatibility of PCI/USB device with RHEL servers we can also refer the same module database file provided by Red Hat by default. And the file is

• /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.alias – for RHEL6 and prior versions
  /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.alias – for RHEL7

For example if you  are looking for an Ethernet Card Support you can use the following approach:

First, Identify the PCI ID of already installed device:

lspci -nn | grep Ether
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:1502] (rev 04)

Here the Vendor ID is 8086 and the device ID is 1502.

Next, Search for the Vendor and Device IDs in the Module Database file.

for RHEL6 and Prior Releases use the command like :

# egrep “8086.*1502” /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.pcimap
e1000e 0x00008086 0x00001502 0xffffffff 0xffffffff 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x0
If no output resulted from the above egrep command , it indicates that the device is incompatible with currently installed Kernel Version.

For RHEL7,  Search for the module as below:

# egrep -i “8086.*1502” /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.alias
alias pci:v00008086d00001502sv*sd*bc*sc*i* e1000e

if the egrep returns nothing, then it indicates that the device is incompatible with currently installed Kernel Version.