Hardware & Drivers

Genesi handles hardware through chwd (CachyOS Hardware Detection), the tool that installs the right drivers automatically during installation. You can re-run it any time hardware changes — most often after swapping a graphics card.

Inspecting hardware

# What's in the machine
lspci -k | grep -A 3 -E "VGA|3D|Audio|Network"

# Driver profiles chwd knows about
chwd -l

# What's currently installed
chwd --list-installed

Re-detecting drivers

If you add hardware and want chwd to install the appropriate driver profile:

sudo chwd -a

This autodetects the hardware and installs the matching profile — the same thing that runs during a fresh install.

Switching between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs

When you physically swap the card in a desktop (say NVIDIA → AMD), the old driver stack has to go and the new one comes in. The safe order is:

Do this from a TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F3) or over SSH, not from inside your desktop session — you're removing the driver the running session depends on.

Remove the old profile / packages (e.g. the NVIDIA stack):

sudo pacman -Rns nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils

Let chwd install the driver for the new card:
```
sudo chwd -a
```
Reboot.

Going the other direction (AMD → NVIDIA) is the same flow: AMD uses the built-in open amdgpu driver, so there's usually nothing to remove, and step 2 installs the NVIDIA driver.

Exact profile names and the finer points of GPU migration are covered in the CachyOS docs — Managing hardware with chwd and Switching between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. For day-to-day GPU driver questions, see GPU Drivers.

Hardware & Drivers

Inspecting hardware

Re-detecting drivers

Switching between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs

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