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How can I know what these unknown devices are? I want to test other distros, but I don't know if they will have the same drivers, so I want to know what device may not work on another distro.

Additional Drivers tab on Software & Updates showing unknown devices using a certain driver

Raffa
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m26a
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1 Answers1

6

You'll need to dig a bit and manually inspect those given you use the right tools the right way ... I can think of two ways that are user friendly(ish) to list enough information for you to identify those devices ...

One way

Note the ubuntu-drivers tool is specific to Ubuntu and may not apply on other Linux distributions ...

ubuntu-drivers list

... will list those drivers ... and:

ubuntu-drivers debug

... will show debug information including devices using those drivers ... So, you can combine the two like:

ubuntu-drivers debug | grep "$(ubuntu-drivers list 2>/dev/null)"

... to limit the debug output to lines containing those drivers.

From the above, you'll get info like:

oem-somerville-meta: installed: 20.04ubuntu9 available: 20.04ubuntu9 (auto-install) [third party] free modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvr1.20.0:bd11/14/2023:br1.20:svnDellInc.:pnVostro3520:pvr:rvnDellInc.:rn0FF2R6:rvrA00:cvnDellInc.:ct10:cvr:sku0B94: path: /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id

... where path: /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id leads to your BIOS chip interface and you can query it in many ways including for example:

udevadm info --attribute-walk --path='/sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id'

Or, you'll get info like:

oem-somerville-olly-adl-meta: installed: 20.04ubuntu8 available: 20.04ubuntu8 (auto-install) [third party] free modalias: pci:v00008086d000051A3sv00001028sd00000B94bc0Csc05i00 path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.4 vendor: Intel Corporation

... where path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.4 indicates that this device lives in a certain address 0000:00:1f.4 at the pci0000:00 interface and thus a PCI device that can be queried with lspci like so:

lspci -vv -s '0000:00:1f.4'

Another way

... which is rather more extensive but still user friendly and portable is using lshw -html like so:

sudo lshw -html > /tmp/hwout.html && xdg-open /tmp/hwout.html

... look for driver=... under the configuration: sub section of each device in order to identify devices using those drivers.

Raffa
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