[CentOS] Who is responsible to load NIC driver when boot up

[Steven Tardy]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 11:44 PM wuzhouhui <wuzhouhui14 at mails.ucas.ac.cn>
wrote:

> I have a small question about NIC driver (e.g. i40e) loading. Who is
> responsible to load i40e driver? And how does he knows we should load
> i40e, instead of ixgbe?


`depmod` may put hardware/driver lists into initramfs when `mkinitrd` is
called when a new kernel is installed.
Also check file: /lib/modules/`uname-r`/modules.alias
The modules.alias contains PCI vendor/device IDs which can be found via
`lspci -n`.

Also you can `modinfo i40e` and `modinfo ixgbe` to see a list of PCI
vendor/device IDs which each driver supports.

Most of the time “it just works” be can be confusing tracking down exactly
why one driver loads instead of another.

>