如何查看有关新加载的外部Linux内核模块的信息？

Question

I have a simple Hello World kernel module from http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/x121.html
I added a few lines with MODULE_AUTHOR , and MODULE_DESCRIPTION

It builds successfully, I'm able to insert it with insmod into the current kernel, view logs with dmesg , check that the module exists with lsmod .

However, I want to be able to view the module's info with modinfo but it doesn't work.
I get modinfo: ERROR: Module hello not found.
I tried running depmod and depmod -A but they didn't make a difference.

Is there any way to make modinfo "reload" so that I can view info for newly added modules?

Answer 1

From the man page:

modinfo extracts information from the Linux Kernel modules given on the command line. If the module name is not a filename, then the /lib/modules/version directory is searched, as is also done by modprobe(8) when loading kernel modules.

So it looks like this command just uses the kernel module files to get this information, so you can either run:

modinfo hello.ko

or you could put your kernel module in the /lib/modules/version/ directory