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How to Check If a Linux Kernel Supports My System Devices

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Finding the right drivers and information about them is very crucial if we want to check their compatibility with our system. There are a lot of techniques and commands that you can use to gather information about your system devices. The Linux distribution that we will be using in this article will be CentOS. You can choose any system of your choice.

In this article, we will discover the ways you can use to check whether or not your Linux Kernel Supports My System Devices. Follow the below steps to find out:

Step 1: Checking the name of the Network device

Use the command below to find out about all the network devices that are in use currently.

ls /sys/class/net/
Checking the name of the Network device

 

Step 2:  Finding the devices attached to the networks:

Let us now see which devices are connected to the networks we just found out.

Finding the devices attached to the networks

 

You can see tons of information about the enp0s3 network, like the RX and TX packets, mtu values, frames etc.

Information of enp0s3 network

 

Step 3: Finding about the module and various drivers

The below command will list out all the modules and drivers which are present in your system

lspci 
Finding about the module and various drivers

 

To list out the driver specifically you can use the above command with the -k flag, we will also use this command in a later section of the article.

lspci -k
Using -k flag for specific driver info

 

We can see that the e1000 driver is in use and the module is the same as well. 

Step 4: Finding the ethernet PCI device

To find the information regarding the network cards on our system, use the below command.

Note: The numbers before the ethernet controllers represent the PCI Id of the bus.

lspci | grep -i Ethernet
Finding the ethernet PCI device

 

Now, to check about various PCI devices go to the directory /sys/bus/pci/devices/.

cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
Check info about various PCI devices

 

Now change the directory and go inside the 0000:00:01.1 folder, there we can see the information about the vendor and the device which is in use.

cd 0000:00:01.1
cat vendor
cat device
Information about Vendor

 

Step 5: Finding about the driver support

Now we will have to see the list of all the available drivers which are compatible. Along with that, the knowledge of their vendors will also be of great use. Change the directory to cd /usr/src/kernels. 

cd /usr/src/kernels
Finding about the driver support

 

Now execute the below command in the kernel space, this command will allow us to see the names of the driver vendors, their modules, the driver in use, etc.

lspci -k

Info about driver vendors, their modules, the driver in use

 

Information displayed

 

The vendor information as well as the kernel information can be seen clearly.

This was how you can find out whether the underlying devices are compatible with the work that you are going to perform or not. Hope you liked the article. 


Last Updated : 23 Dec, 2022
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