How to list all loadable kernel modules?

Question

I'm looking for a few kernel modules to load i2c-dev and i2c-bcm2708. But the modprobe command returns:

sudo modprobe i2c-dev
modprobe: module i2c-dev not found in modules.dep

How can I list all the available modules in the system? In which directory are they located?

Answer 1

• By default modprobe loads modules from subdirectories located in the /lib/modules/$(uname -r) directory. Usually all files have extension .ko, so you can list them with

  find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type f -name '*.ko'
  

  or, taking into account compressed files:

  find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type f -name '*.ko*'
  

• However, to load a module successfully modprobe needs its dependencies listed in the file /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.dep (and a corresponding binary version modules.dep.bin). If some module is present on the system, but is not on the list, then you should run a command depmod which will generate such dependencies and automatically include your module to modules.dep and modules.dep.bin.

• Additionally, if the module is successfully loaded it will be listed in the file /proc/modules (also accessed via command lsmod).

Answer 2

Type modprobe and press tab, the autocomplete list should contain all the loadable modules

Answer 3

There is lsmod command of kmod package in Arch Linux what lists and shows the status of Linux kernel modules that contains other useful commands such as modinfo, rmmod modprobe too.

To list all binaries provided by the package you can type:

pacman -Ql kmod | grep /bin/ --color=always

, and you can also check for the owner package of a binary with pacman -Qo lsmod.

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Q switch is to query locally installed packages (unlike S to synchronize, ie. to check remotely).