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How to know if there is a (compiled in/kernel module) device driver controlling a device on a running linux?

Answer 1

+2 A:

I don't think you can get a 100% clear-cut answer that you can get in Windows device manager.

A device may be controlled by several kernel modules (say nvidia + agpgart).
A kernel module may control more than one device (usbhid).
You can also have many-to-many relationship (usbcore + usbhid).

Alex B 2008-10-03 16:04:31

Answer 2

+2 A:

Try HAL device manger, which is also available as "KDE HAL device manger" and "gnome-device-manager". Basically, these are frontends to the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), which reads /sysfs/ et al.

It gives information like "info.linux.driver", see the screenshot below:

I'm sorry I don't know how to fiddle out this information yourself in sysfs, but it must be somewhere if HAL is able to find it :-)

ypnos 2008-10-03 20:23:33

Answer 3

+1 A:

lspci -n will give you PCI ids that you can search for on the linux kernel driver database. This will tell you which kernel options to enable.

wnoise 2008-10-05 02:30:24

Answer 4

A:

The following script will tell you which dynamically loaded drivers are running, although I would also like an automated way of figuring out which compiled in modules are actually in use also so I could de-bloat my kernel some more.

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/lsmod | tail -n+2 | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs /sbin/modinfo -n | sort ;

I'm not sure how relevent the rest of this is to your question but thought you or others might find it useful.

The following code will figure out which .config options control each of the dynamically loaded kernel modules, although I haven't figured out a way to do the same for dynamic modules in the ubuntu lum package yet ( this script is still a work in progress ):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Getopt::Long;

my ($kernConfigIn, $kernConfigOut, $kernSourceDir, $lumSourceDir, $lumConfigIn, $lumConfigOut, $help);

GetOptions(
    'ksd=s'   => \$kernSourceDir,
    'lsd=s'    => \$lumSourceDir,
    'kci=s'      => \$kernConfigIn,
    'lci=s'       => \$lumConfigIn,
    'kco=s'      => \$kernConfigOut,
    'lco=s'       => \$lumConfigOut,
    'help' => \$help);

if ($help || !$kernSourceDir || !$lumSourceDir ) { Usage($0); }

sub Usage {  print "usage error\n"; exit; };

my @modules = `/sbin/lsmod | tail -n+2 | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs /sbin/modinfo -n | sort ;`;
my @kconfig;

foreach my $module (@modules) {
    my ($package, $path, $modName) = ( $module =~ m/\/((?:kernel)|(?:ubuntu))\/(.*)\/(.*)\.ko/) ;
    $package eq 'kernel' ? push @kconfig, kernel($package, $path, $modName) : ubuntu($package, $path, $modName); 
}

# kernel package
sub kernel {
    my ($package, $path, $modName) = @_;
    my $makefile = $kernSourceDir.$path."/Makefile"; 
#    print "$package, $path, $modName\n";
#    print "$makefile\n";
    my $option;
    chomp($option = `cat $makefile | sed -n "s/^obj-\\\$(CONFIG_\\([A-Z0-9_]*\\))\\W*+=.*"$modName"\\.o.*/CONFIG_\\1/p"`);
    print "$option\n";
    return $option;
}

# deal with lum configs
sub ubuntu {

}

There is a script by Andreas Goelzer which with slight modification will turn off all unused kernel modules in your .config which significantly speeds up your compiles.

You can find it here:

http://andreas.goelzer.de/kernel-config-based-on-lsmod-output

Robert S. Barnes 2009-06-16 06:39:34

Answer 5

A:

Well this is a little late, and maybe at that time (2008) didn't even exists, but lspci -n or better lspci -k should fix the problem; for instance:

04:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)
    Kernel driver in use: wl
    Kernel modules: wl, ssb

anders 2010-07-03 17:00:29

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How to know if there is a (compiled in/kernel module) device driver controlling a device on a running linux?

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