How do I review a hardware deprecation warning?

Support
1

I’m wondering how I can find out what resources I have for evaluating a hardware deprecation warning that I see in the kernel boot logs.

The warning is about NIC on a dell optiplex 9020, I can’t remember the specific name of the module right now, but I’m just looking for more general information on the issue. Other than the message I don’t have any way of confirming the status of any piece of hardware for a given release or kernel version. I’d really like to be empowered with the knowledge to do so.

How will I know what release is going to drop support for a given piece of hardware?

And also I see the elrepo.org has newer / different kernels available to install, would these kernels potentially be a solution for unsupported hardware in the future and how could I check?

2

lspci lists devices. Not USB-devices though.
The most useful bit, device ID, is shown with -nn option and -k shows which kernel module is currently used for the device.
Hence, lspci -nn -k or if you want to limit the list to NICs lspci -nn -k -d ::0200

I don’t recall that Red Hat would have removed a driver from major version.
What they do is flag something deprecated to show that a future major version will not have it.

That is, deprecated in el9 means that (A) it will stay in el9 to 2032 (in el8 to 2029), and (B) el10 may not have it.

AlmaLinux builds and includes more drivers than RHEL. If the warning is there because RHEL has the kernel module as deprecated, then that does not automatically mean that AlmaLinux will omit it in future major version.

Overall ELRepo has performed that role for years: they build kernel modules for EL that EL does not have (both too old and too new modules).

The kernels that ELRepo builds for EL are more directly from upstream sources – i.e. “plain vanilla” Linux kernels, with (all/most?) drivers included. With them the question is whether/when Linus drops stuff from kernel.

I have access to one Dell 9020. It has AlmaLinux 9. Dmesg shows only one deprecation:

# dmesg -T | grep -i depre
[Mon Feb 17 10:05:02 2025] XFS (sda1): Deprecated V4 format (crc=0) will not be supported beginning with RHEL10

IIRC, that filesystem was created with CentOS 7. The note shows that XFS (driver) evolves.

The NIC had device ID 8086:153a and is supported by the e1000e driver:

# lspci -nn -k -d ::0200
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I217-LM [8086:153a] (rev 04)
	DeviceName:  Onboard LAN
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:05a4]
	Kernel driver in use: e1000e
	Kernel modules: e1000e

I don’t think the e1000e will disappear any time soon. It might drop support for some older variants though. That is where ELRepo kmod packages usually step in to provide a bit more.

3

Thank you for that detailed and quick reply. I deployed Almalinux on a 9020 today and I felt confident doing so after what you taught me :+1: