Questions tagged [drivers]
A device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device.
2,355 questions
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What is difference between User space and Kernel space?
Is Kernel space used when Kernel is executing on the behalf of the user program i.e. System Call? Or is it the address space for all the Kernel threads (for example scheduler)?
If it is the first one,...
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What is the difference between kernel drivers and kernel modules?
When I do a lspci -k on my Kubuntu with a 3.2.0-29-generic kernel I can see something like this:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G86 [Quadro NVS 290] (rev a1)
Subsystem: ...
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Bluetooth won't turn On on Ubuntu 20.04
I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), and Bluetooth seemed to work out-of-the-box. Yesterday, it stopped working without any known reason.
I can turn it on, but the settings still show it ...
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How to find the driver (module) associated with a device on Linux?
On Linux, given:
a device, for example /dev/sda,
and its major and minor numbers, for example 8, 0,
how can I know which module / driver is "driving" it?
Can I dig into /sys or /proc to discover ...
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What's the philosophy behind delaying writing data to disk?
In Linux, a finished execution of a command such as cp or dd doesn't mean that the data has been written to the device. One has to, for example, call sync, or invoke the "Safely Remove" or "Eject" ...
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How to close X Server, to avoid errors while updating nVidia driver?
I tried to update my nVidia driver but I got an error when I ran the driver installation.
See the error:
ERROR: You appear to be running an X server; please exit X before
...
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Does the kernel have a main() function? [closed]
I am learning device drivers and Kernel programming. According to Jonathan Corbet's book, there is no main() function in device drivers.
So I two questions:
Why don't we need a main() function in ...
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Find out which modules are associated with a usb device?
Could you recommend a way to figure out which driver is being used for a USB device.
Sort of a usb equivalent of lspci -k command.
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What is the difference between ioctl(), unlocked_ioctl() and compat_ioctl()?
Going through the linux 2.6.36 source code at lxr.linux.no, I could not find the ioctl() method in file_operations. Instead I found two new calls: unlocked_ioctl() and compat_ioctl().
What is the ...
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How to find out which Wi-Fi driver is installed?
I know about lsmod, but how do I figure out which driver does what?
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How do character device or character special files work?
I am trying to understand character special files. From wikipedia, I understand that these files
"provide an interface" for devices that transmit data one character at a time. My understanding is ...
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What’s the difference between a “raw” and a “cooked” device driver?
Does this concept only apply to terminal drivers (which is what most sites cover) or to any driver in general?
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Is USB-to-USB data transfer between two Linux OSes possible?
I want to create a USB-to-USB data transfer system in Linux (preferably Ubuntu). For this I want to use no external hardware or switch (except this cable). It's going to be like mounting a USB drive ...
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How to use Linux kernel driver bind/unbind interface for USB-HID devices?
First background. I am developing a driver for Logitech game-panel devices. It's a keyboard with a screen on it. The driver is working nicely but by default the device is handled by HID. In order to ...
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How to assign USB driver to device
This question is two-fold:
First, how do you manually detach a driver from a USB device and attach a different one? For example, I have a device that when connected automatically uses the usb-...