Howto: Display list of modules or device drivers in the Linux Kernel

Q. How do I display list of loaded Linux Kernel modules or device drivers?

A. You need to use lsmod program which show the status of loaded modules in the Linux Kernel. Linux use term modules for hardware device drivers.

lsmod is a trivial program which nicely formats the contents of the /proc/modules, showing what kernel modules are currently loaded.

This is an important task. With lsmod you can verify that device driver is loaded for particular hardware. Any hardware device will only work if device driver is loaded.

Task: List or display loaded modules

$ less /proc/modules $ lsmod
Output:

Module                  Size  Used by
snd_mixer_oss          20096  0
i830                   78596  2
sg                     39168  0
ppdev                   9924  0
sr_mod                 17316  0
vmnet                  39032  12
vmmon                 111788  0
ipv6                  264772  12
ipt_LOG                 6560  1
ipt_state               2080  1
ip_conntrack_ftp       72368  0
iptable_mangle          2880  0
iptable_nat            25156  0
ip_conntrack           35756  3 ipt_state,ip_conntrack_ftp,iptable_nat
....
..
....

First column is Module name and second column is size of modules i..e the output format is module name, size, use count, list of referring modules.