Problem statement

Feedback from architects at the RHEL Conversions and Upgrades Feedback Workshop at 2025 Red Hat One revealed that:

Hardware compatibility and certification is a major barrier to upgrading RHEL systems.

Customers doing upgrades & conversions have difficulty finding out if the OS will work on the hardware. The current process is manual and time consuming. 

The process of confirming if the hardware vendor provides drivers for the new RHEL version is manual and time consuming. (Google, KCS, Partner Catalog, reaching out to vendors…)

See more at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fCi0LvtnyiMAhRCcP9tqYNSJPLBs9IGWtkUXMjnZ4iE/edit#slide=id.g33a828d4ca5_0_27. 

Goal

As a customer,

I want leapp to told me whether my hardware has drivers available and whether the hardware is certified in the RHEL version I want to upgrade to

so that I don't need to manually check the driver availability and certification of every hardware piece.

Acceptance criteria

• leapp provides a pre-upgrade analysis report message listing all hardware and for each of the items stating:
  • Is it maintained (supported) or at least unmaintained (driver available but no commitment to fixing
    issues) in RHEL.next? Leapp provides this information already now.
    • If not, leapp may query a Red Hat-run LLM-as-a-service API endpoint to provide at least some information the customer can start with, e.g. whether a 3rd party driver is available and how to obtain it.
  • Is it certified in RHEL.next?
    • The information about hardware certification is available at https://catalog.redhat.com/search?searchType=hardware - we may need to find out how to access the source data for this web service to be able to work with it in leapp.
    • Again, another option might be to use an LLM.

Related information

pstodulk@redhat.com explaining how leapp now provides some information about hardware to customers: https://gitlab.com/redhat/rhel/src/kernel/hardware-removal-support/-/issues/2#note_1578364655.