Hardware support

The installer does not ask you whether your machine is suitable. It measures it with river-hwprobe, makes a plan with river-plan --profile workstation, and refuses a machine below a minimum, naming the one it missed. The rules on this page are the planner’s own, from installer/internal/planner/plan.go and docs/INSTALLER-HARDWARE.md.

Minimums

What	Minimum	The refusal you see
Firmware	UEFI	`firmware booted in legacy BIOS mode: RIVER requires UEFI (...)`
CPU	x86-64-v3: AVX2, FMA, F16C, BMI1/2, MOVBE (Intel Haswell, AMD Excavator or newer)	`CPU is x86-64-v2 (missing ...): ... built for x86-64-v3 (AVX2/FMA/F16C/BMI2)`
Physical cores	2	`1 physical cores: the minimum is 2`
RAM	7168 MiB as the kernel reports it (`MemTotal`), which is what 8 GB installed shows	`6144 MiB RAM (MemTotal): the minimum is 7168 MiB (8 GB installed)`
Disk	one eligible disk of 64 GiB or more	`no eligible target disk (need a non-removable, non-USB, unused disk of at least 64 GiB)`

The numbers in the example messages are illustrations; the planner prints yours. A workstation has no minimum pool size beyond the disk: a single-disk pool is fine.

Trying anyway

On a virtual machine or a test rig, the graphical installer’s Details link on the “Your computer” screen offers Try anyway (lab); the text installer takes --lab. The plan then records every minimum it waived (LAB OVERRIDE: ... refusal(s) waived). It is meant for testing: a machine below the minimums may not work.

Which disks can be used

river-hwprobe marks a disk ineligible, with the reason, when it is any of:

Reason in the plan	Meaning
`boot medium of this installer`	the USB stick you booted from; it is never a target
`... is mounted at ...`, `... is active swap`, `... is held by ...`	the disk or one of its partitions is in use
`USB-attached`	any disk on USB, including external SSDs
`removable media`	card readers and similar
`read-only`	write-protected devices
`smaller than 8 GiB`	too small to consider

An eligible disk smaller than 64 GiB is listed as unused. Every disk the plan will erase is shown with its serial number, and every disk it leaves alone is shown with the reason. The probe only reads /proc, /sys and the udev database; it never opens a block device and needs no root.

More than one disk

Several eligible disks become one pool with redundancy. The layout rules, with the special vdev for hard disks plus SSDs and the size-group rule for mixed disks, are on Installer & hardware planner.

Multi-disk installs are the least tested path. 10-disk-zfs.sh’s multi-disk layouts have not yet run on real hardware or in a VM; the drivers were exercised end to end with stub steps. And only the boot disk’s EFI partition is kept up to date: the other disks get one, formatted but empty, so if the boot disk of a mirror dies the pool survives, but the machine needs its EFI partition recreated before it boots again.

Graphics, media and firmware

Area	On the image
GPU drivers	Mesa for AMD and Intel: `mesa`, `vulkan-radeon`, `vulkan-intel`, `vulkan-icd-loader`, `libva-mesa-driver`
Hardware video	`intel-media-driver` (VA-API for recent Intel graphics) and `libva-utils` (`vainfo`)
Codecs	`gst-plugins-base`, `-good`, `-bad`, `-ugly`, `gst-libav`, `ffmpeg`
Firmware	`linux-firmware-amdgpu` and `linux-firmware-intel` only
Audio	PipeWire (`pipewire`, `pipewire-pulse`, `pipewire-alsa`, `pipewire-jack`, `wireplumber`)
Bluetooth, printing	`bluez`, `bluez-utils`, `cups`, with the Plasma front ends

NVIDIA’s proprietary driver is not included. Devices that need firmware from other vendors' firmware packages (some Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, for example) may not work, because only the AMD GPU and Intel firmware packages are on the image.

Check a machine before you install

In the live session (Konsole), the probe and the planner run without changing anything:

river-hwprobe                                     # a human-readable summary
river-hwprobe --json > probe.json                 # the full inventory (schema river.hwprobe/v1)
river-plan --probe probe.json --no-models --profile workstation   # the plan the installer would make

river-plan exits 0 when the plan is usable and 3 when it is refused, printing the plan either way. The JSON schemas are a stable contract, documented in docs/INSTALLER-HARDWARE.md.