eldavi , 6 days ago

here’s an example using my wifi card on my laptop; here i use lscpi and i’ve copy/pasted the stanza that pertains to the wifi card:

<span style="color:#323232;">me@laptop:~$ lspci -v
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[REMOVED]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi (rev 01)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wi-Fi 6(802.11ax) AX201 160MHz 2x2 [Harrison Peak]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 9
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        Memory at 601d18c000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        Capabilities: <access denied>
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        Kernel modules: iwlwifi
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[REMOVED]
</span>

i can see that the driver name is iwlwifi and i can use that to look for related modules using lsmod:

<span style="color:#323232;">me@laptop:~$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
</span><span style="color:#323232;">iwlwifi               598016  1 iwlmvm
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cfg80211             1318912  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211
</span>

now i know all of the module names and i can either google them to learn how to install them or i can continue further with the package manager on the installation to further backwards engineer it. (googling is faster).

as i mentioned earlier there are caveats: downstream distros tend to use a slightly older version of their base distros so you also need to make sure that you’re using the same version of the driver and kernel and adjust accordingly if it doesn’t start working right away.