Hardware and Drivers in Linux

Controlling your hardware in Linux with the correct driver is critical to the performance of your system. Using the correct tools we can view the hardware and drivers in use as well as their configuration. Now we take the path of looking in more detail of how programs in Linux access the hardware. We can use tools like lspci to list devices on the PCI bus and lsusb to see devices in the USB bus. To view loaded drivers we can visit /proc/modules or just run the command lsmod. With this underway we can load and unload drivers with modprobe and the older tools insmod to load and rmmod to unload. Unprivileged software running in user space memory will access devices using the sysfs, a virtual filesystem representing devices mounted into the directory /sys.