28.5. Enhancing Hardware Support

By default, Red Hat Enterprise Linux attempts to automatically detect and configure support for all of the components of your computer. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports the majority of hardware in common use with the software drivers that are included with the operating system. To support other devices you may supply additional drivers during the installation process, or at a later time.

28.5.1. Overriding Automatic Hardware Detection

For some models of device automatic hardware configuration may fail, or cause instability. In these cases, you may need to disable automatic configuration for that type of device, and take additional steps to manually configure the device after the installation process is complete.

Check the Release Notes

Refer to the Release Notes for information on known issues with specific devices.

To override the automatic hardware detection, use one or more of the following options:

Table 28.3. Hardware Options

Compatibility	Option
Disable all hardware detection	`noprobe`
Disable graphics, keyboard, and mouse detection	`headless`
Disable passing keyboard and mouse information to stage 2 of the installation program	`nopass`
Use basic VESA driver for video	`xdriver=vesa`
Disable shell access on virtual console 2 during installation	`noshell`
Disable advanced configuration and power interface (ACPI)	`acpi=off`
Disable machine check exception (MCE) CPU self-diagnosis.	`nomce`
Disable non-uniform menory access on the AMD64 architecture	`numa-off`
Force kernel to detect a specific amount of memory, where `xxx` is a value in megabytes	`mem=xxxm`
Enable DMA only for IDE and SATA drives	`libata.dma=1`
Disable BIOS-assisted RAID	`nodmraid`
Disable Firewire device detection	`nofirewire`
Disable parallel port detection	`noparport`
Disable PC Card (PCMCIA) device detection	`nopcmcia`
Disable USB storage device detection	`nousbstorage`
Disable all USB device detection	`nousb`
Disable all probing of network hardware	`nonet`

Additional Screen

The isa option causes the system to display an additional text screen at the beginning of the installation process. Use this screen to configure the ISA devices on your computer.

Important

Other kernel boot options have no particular meaning for anaconda and do not affect the installation process. However, if you use these options to boot the installation system, anaconda will preserve them in the bootloader configuration.