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If my target has one device connected and many drivers for that device loaded, how can I understand what device is using which driver?

Alexios
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10 Answers10

77

Just use /sys.

Example. I want to find the driver for my Ethernet card:

$ sudo lspci
...
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 01)
$ find /sys | grep drivers.*02:00
/sys/bus/pci/drivers/r8169/0000:02:00.0

That is r8169.

First I need to find coordinates of the device using lspci; then I find driver that is used for the devices with these coordinates.

Igor Chubin
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    lspci -v does it by itself. – poige Jul 01 '12 at 04:50
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    lspci -nk will show you attached drivers. In general the sysfs is the right place to search for. – 0andriy Nov 18 '15 at 20:03
  • @AndyShevchenko thank you! This will be a great timesaver for me :-D – pepoluan Nov 29 '16 at 03:19
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    I know the OP asked for "drivers being used", but what if the driver is not installed nor being used? How to find out just by the vendorID:productID? Also, what if it is not a PCI device, and you only see it in lsusb for example? – DrBeco Jun 26 '17 at 18:48
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    @DrBeco: But if driver is not installed, what do you want to find? You should just google in this case – Igor Chubin Jun 27 '17 at 15:18
  • Well, not an option if you are trying to find the correct driver to load for a bunch of network cards that are not working (so, no google, unless you keep moving to another machine, or booting something that work, which takes time) – DrBeco Jun 28 '17 at 00:13
  • And if it's USB? Is there a generic way to do this? Looking at /sys or /proc or something? – Owl Sep 12 '18 at 12:26
  • lspci -vk | grep -A 6 -i ethernet but you have to adjust the number of lines printed after the matching line with -A. – Ludovic Kuty Apr 06 '20 at 06:54
45

Here's a little script I wrote:

#!/bin/bash
for f in /sys/class/net/*; do
    dev=$(basename $f)
    driver=$(readlink $f/device/driver/module)
    if [ $driver ]; then
        driver=$(basename $driver)
    fi
    addr=$(cat $f/address)
    operstate=$(cat $f/operstate)
    printf "%10s [%s]: %10s (%s)\n" "$dev" "$addr" "$driver" "$operstate"
done

Sample output:

$ ~/what_eth_drivers.sh 
      eth0 [52:54:00:aa:bb:cc]: virtio_net (up)
      eth1 [52:54:00:dd:ee:ff]: virtio_net (up)
      eth2 [52:54:00:99:88:77]: virtio_net (up)
        lo [00:00:00:00:00:00]:            (unknown)
Jonathon Reinhart
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18

sudo lspci -v will show it. like this:

$ sudo lspci -v
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro  Devices, Inc......
...
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon

You can also combine it with grep like this: 

$ sudo lspci -v | grep -A 20 VGA
Jonathon Reinhart
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mlibre
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6

If you just want to plainly use sysfs and doesn't want to deal with all these commands which eventually looks inside sysfs anyways, here's how:

say, what is the module/driver for eth6? "sfc" it is

# ls -l /sys/class/net/eth6/device/driver
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Jan 22 12:30 /sys/class/net/eth6/device/driver ->
../../../../bus/pci/drivers/sfc

or better yet.. let readlink resolve the path for you.

# readlink -f /sys/class/net/eth6/device/driver
/sys/bus/pci/drivers/sfc

so... to figure out what are the drivers for all of your network interfaces:

# ls -1 /sys/class/net/ | grep -v lo | xargs -n1 -I{} bash -c 'echo -n {} :" " ; basename `readlink -f /sys/class/net/{}/device/driver`'

eth0 : tg3
eth1 : tg3
eth10 : mlx4_core
eth11 : mlx4_core
eth2 : tg3
eth3 : tg3
eth4 : mlx4_core
eth5 : mlx4_core
eth6 : sfc
eth7 : sfc
eth8 : sfc
eth9 : sfc
Rui F Ribeiro
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Monty Montemayor
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  • how is this one better than the one Jonathan Reinhart posted ? https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/225496/47663 – nhed Feb 08 '18 at 04:58
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    Probably same... but I love one liner... I can easily adjust things right at the command line... just for those who don't have time to open a file and write a script. – Monty Montemayor Feb 13 '18 at 17:37
5

For USB based devices you can see the driver name by using the lsusb command:

lsusb -t

And/or you use lshw which enumerates the devices on all buses including USB, PCI, etc so you can see which driver it uses:

sudo lshw
Pierz
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  • FTR: the driver is shown at line titled configuration, for example: configuration: driver=btusb maxpower=100mA speed=12Mbit/s – Hi-Angel Mar 21 '21 at 13:41
4

When ethtool is installed you can simply use:

$ ethtool -i enp2s0 | grep driver | awk '{print $2}'
r8169

where enp2s0 is the device name. ethtool provides detailed information about the interface:

$ ethtool -i enp2s0
driver: r8169
version: 2.3LK-NAPI
firmware-version: rtl8168e-3_0.0.4 03/27/12
expansion-rom-version: 
bus-info: 0000:02:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: no
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no

In order to install on Debian/Ubuntu:

apt install ethtool
Tombart
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3

You can use the lsmod command to get the status of loaded modules / devices drivers in the Linux Kernel.

For a specific device, you can use dmesg |grep <device-name> to get the details too.

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    Thanks. But if i loaded two drivers for a device with same major no and different minor no ,and if only one driver is being used for the device ,how can I find which driver is used for that device? –  Jun 27 '12 at 06:34
  • perhaps this SO question can help you further. –  Jun 27 '12 at 06:49
  • If your system has not been online so long that the ring buffer has re-started, sure dmesg | grep will work ; this doesn't work on any of my routers, however. – cjac Mar 07 '16 at 01:47
0

For me I needed a way to link network device names to driver pci names, here is a one-liner (adjust or remove the "grep ens" to whatever name network device name you want to search for)

for i in $(ip -br addr show | awk '{print$1}' | grep ens); do echo "$i: $(ethtool -i $i| grep bus-info)" ; done

Dave
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0

You can use inxi with the relevant parameter. For example to see the network devices and the drivers you can use inxi -N

mint@computer:~$ inxi -N

Network:
  Device-1: Intel 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet driver: e1000
  Device-2: Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI type: network bridge
    driver: piix4_smbus

Some parameter you might want to use. To see the complete list check the man page

-A
    Show Audio/sound card information. 
-G
    Show Graphic card information. Card(s), Display Server (vendor and version number)
-N
    Show Network card information. With -x, shows PCI BusID, Port number.
mustafa candan
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0

Watching /sys filesystem/ For example for device eth0, with command

ls  /sys/class/net/eth0/device/driver -l

Output says the driver is linked to "virtio" driver

    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 11 14:43 /sys/class/net/eth0/device/driver -> ../../../../bus/virtio/drivers/virtio_net
user3585447
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