The hardware health subtest checks the system’s health by testing if the hardware is supported, meets the requirements, and has any known hardware vulnerabilities.

The subtest does the following:

• Checks that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) kernel does not identify hardware as unsupported. When the kernel identifies unsupported hardware, it displays a message similar to “unsupported hardware” in the system logs and triggers an unsupported kernel taint. This subtest mitigates the risk of running Red Hat products on unsupported configurations and environments.

  In hypervisor, partitioning, cloud instances, and other virtual machine situations, the kernel may trigger an unsupported hardware message or taint based on the hardware data presented to RHEL by the virtual machine.

• Checks that the host under test meets the minimum hardware requirements:

  • RHEL 8 and later: Minimum system RAM must be 1.5GB by CPU logical core count.
• Checks if the kernel has reported any known hardware vulnerabilities.
• Confirms that no CPUs are offline in the system.
• Confirms if simultaneous multithreading is available, enabled, and active in the system.

Failing any of these tests will result in a warning from the test suite. Check the warnings to ensure the product is working as intended.

Success criteria

• The kernel does not have the UNSUPPORTEDHARDWARE taint bit set.
• The kernel does not report an unsupported hardware system message.
• The kernel does not report any vulnerabilities.
• The kernel does not report the logic core-to-installed memory ratio as out of range.
• The kernel does not report CPUs in an offline state.