How can I find out what drivers are built into my kernel?

Question

sensors-detect tells me:

To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules:

# Chip drivers
coretemp
w83627ehf

If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones!

How can I find out which drivers are appropriate to skip, if any?

Answer 1

• The canonical method is to check your running kernel config, but this can be hard to parse because it will include both modules and other options and the names may not correspond:

  grep "=y" /boot/config-`uname -r`

• Practically, it's much easier to simply do a:

  locate name-of-module | grep `uname -r`.*ko`

  (make sure the database has been recently updated, with sudo updatedb if necessary)

  If you see a .ko file entry like:

  /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic/kernel/drivers/hwmon/coretemp.ko

  then this module is NOT built-in and can properly be added to /etc/modules

  • But if you get no results in /lib/modules, then the module IS built-in and there may be no need to explicitly load it.

• A variation to find all non-built-in modules in /lib/modules is:

  locate /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep -Po "(?<=/)\w+(?=\.ko)"