Determining supported hardware

[pvswie]

Hi,

I have a Netgate SG-1100 and am trying to find out my options for adding a mini PCI-e device to it.

What gave me hope that some devices might be supported I tried to connect a whole bunch of USB devices (USB-ethernet dongles) to my SG-1100. To my surprice, all these devices were recognized, the associated driver loaded and showed (ifconfig) up as a network device. So if PCI-e would be similar ...

The netgate SG-1100 shows in its kernel boot log that a driver for PCI-e (Marvell Armada 3700 PCIe Bus Controller) is loaded which might imply that I can install a PCI-e device. I however do not own any mini PCI-e cards to check / test anything.

Instead of ordering devices to try I would like to know which devices might work. Therefore: Can anyone point me in a direction to find out for which devices the drivers are included? Also: In case the drivers for my PCI-e device are not included, are there any other options? I am thinking about:

• If the kernel supports device XYZ there must be a driver that is either build into the kernel or a loadable module. How to get a list of what is build into the kernel? How to get a list of loadable modules?
• If it turns out the driver for my device is not included, is there any way to add it? I assume I can forget about building a kernel myself and replace the Netgate kernel. Instead the question whether it is realistic to just build the module put it somewhere in the file system, do something to make the kernel understand to load my module when appropriate (or maybe load it manually).

Kind regards
Peter

 

[tingo]

Have you tried apropos pcie? (you can use apropos pci too, it will give you some false positives). Then you will just have to read through the man pages returned, and check if you still can buy any devices that you want.