Configuring specialized hardware has become easier and easier, even since the development of LPI's Level 2 Exams. Items such as LCD panels and serial UPS devices used to not be as common in our homes and offices, but today they are considered standard equipment.
When you prepared for Level 1, you became familiar with a number of the tools you must utilize when adding new hardware to your systems. For the Level 2 exams, you must be prepared to understand when to use them and the most efficient methods for installing your new devices.
Before you tackle adding any new hardware devices to your system, it's useful to be able to obtain information about the hardware you have installed. Some useful tools to report this information include lsmod, lsdev, and lspci.
lsmod
lsmod [options
]
The lsmod command displays all the information available about currently loaded modules. Reviewing your loaded modules is often the first step in identifying possible problems, such as driver conflicts (quite frequently found with USB device drivers). This information can also be found in /proc/modules. lsmod has only two options, neither of them affecting its operation.
Display help information.
Display the version.
The output of lsmod is a series of columns identifying the module name, its size, its use number, and its status. A sample of lsmod output looks like this:
Module Size Used by Not tainted vfat 12844 0 (autoclean) fat 38328 0 (autoclean) [vfat] nfs 79960 0 (autoclean) ide-scsi 11984 0 (autoclean) ide-cd 35196 0 (autoclean) cdrom 33440 0 (autoclean) [ide-cd] tuner 11680 1 (autoclean) tvaudio 14940 0 (autoclean) (unused) bttv 73568 0 (autoclean) videodev 8192 2 (autoclean) [bttv] radeon 114244 28 agpgart 46752 3 parport_pc 18756 1 (autoclean) lp 8868 0 (autoclean) parport 36480 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
lsdev
lsdev
The lsdev command displays information about your system's hardware, such as interrupt addresses and I/O ports. The command is useful for obtaining information prior to installing devices that may have hardware addressing conflicts, such as ISA devices. This command uses DMA files in /proc to also report I/O addresses and IRQ and DMA channel information. There are no options for lsdev.
The output of lsdev is very simple, similar to lsmod. It lists information in four columns: device name, DMA address, IRQ address, and I/O ports. The following is some sample output from lsdev:
Device DMA IRQ I/O Ports ------------------------------------------------ ATI c800-c8ff bttv 10 Creative e800-e81f ec00-ec07 dma 0080-008f dma1 0000-001f dma2 00c0-00df e100 e000-e03f EMU10K1 11 e800-e81f fpu 00f0-00ff ide0 14 01f0-01f7 03f6-03f6 fc00-fc07 ide1 15 0170-0177 0376-0376 fc08-fc0f Intel e000-e03f keyboard 1 0060-006f ohci1394 12 PCI 0cf8-0cff c000-cfff
lspci
lspci [options
]
The lspci command displays information about your system's PCI buses and your installed PCI devices. This information is found primarily within /proc.
Show a treelike diagram containing all buses, bridges, devices, and connections between them.
Very verbose mode.