Identifying which driver for given device

statikregimen · Last edited by statikregimen on Tue Aug 01, 2017 4:14 am; edited 1 time in total

Greetings,
I've been at this for days and posting this because every time I do, I find the answer on my own shortly after. It's a curse.

Anyway, it seems like there has to be a way to identify what specifically one needs to enable in the kernel configuration based on the output of lspci and others (I mean somehow the kernel obviously works out which driver and/or module for each device). Yet, and endless barrage of googling has turned up no such method.

I've more or less gotten lucky so far on this machine but now have an elusive webcam and touchscreen that still need drivers. I know they are supported as I ran Debian Jessie on this machine.and they are also detected and modules loaded by Sabayon live image.

Using Sabayon live image, I've checked the output of lspci -k, lsusb, and usb-devices (both the camera and touchscreen are usb in this case), also lsmod. That is all great, but it only gives me some loose guidance. Some devices are apparently not so straight forward.

I swear I've done this a few times before, but it's lost to me now

I'm intentionally not posting any additional details about my hardware because I am asking how to find out for myself - not asking for someone to tell me!

Thanks in advance!

p.s. yes, i've looked at all the related wiki and doc articles I can find... from here and everywhere. And yes, I am aware that I'm overlooking something horribly obvious so go easy on me!

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

This is out of date but still helps 99% of the time.

If you boot from a livecd, `make localyesconfig` in the kernel tree enables all currently loaded drivers.

You can also run e.g. `udevadm info /sys/bus/pci/devices/$foo` (no trailing slash) to get some info (it works on other things besides PCI), and the MODALIAS=* line it prints out can be passed directly to modinfo/modprobe to see what driver it thinks it should load.

99% of webcams are either GSPCA or UVC. Touchscreens are a bit more difficult but sometimes usbhid works fine. If it has a kernel driver loaded but doesn't work otherwise, try libinput.

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 12:53 am Post subject:

You can grep kernel sources for USB ID, or search http://cateee.net

Even plain net search can help, my webcam as an example.
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Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21635

OP: you mentioned lsmod -k; did you mean lspci -k? The latter tells you which kernel driver is bound to a device. That is usually the hard part. Once you know what kernel driver serves the device, you need to find what Kconfig symbol will build that driver in the kernel of your choice. If you are lucky, the Kconfig symbol will have the driver's name as a substring, so you can find it using / to search in menuconfig. If you are not lucky, you may need to explore the kernel Makefiles to work backward from the source that implements the driver to the rule that causes that source to be built.

josephg

statikregimen · Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 1:55 am Post subject:

statikregimen

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

For me, the best i have found to get drivers name from a running system is

statikregimen · Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 4:13 am Post subject:

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21635

statikregimen · Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:21 am Post subject:

Thanks, Hu.... I'll try your suggestion! The original suggestion seemed to work ok, but I don't fully understand your explanation. Mainly what is a glob?

In the mean time, I broke down and installed sys-kernel/kergen which comes with a couple useful tools. Plus, I happen to be quite proficient in Python so should be able to glean more knowledge from the source as well. It will also be a good stopgap until I master this subject.

I am getting there, though!

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21635

Read man 7 glob for a better background than I could readily enter here. (Ask if you still have questions after reading it. Always feel free to ask for elaborations on manual page references.)

Yes, the original will work fine (although perhaps less efficiently (although immeasurably so in most cases)), provided you have no files in the current directory with driver as an initial substring of the filename. If you do, the shell will expand driver* to that list instead of running find with a literal driver*. If you don't have such files, but you do have failglob (Bash name; other shells may name it otherwise, if they have it at all), then the command simply fails. Consider: