Manage network adapters using ethtool in Linux

With ethtool, you can get detailed information about the network adapters in your server or virtual machine.

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ethtool is a useful utility for displaying information about and configuring network adapters in Linux.

For example, to retrieve link information for the network adapter, you can run this command:

Command

ethtool ens192

This will output something similar to this:

Output

Settings for ens192:
        Supported ports: [ TP ]
        Supported link modes:   1000baseT/Full
                                10000baseT/Full
        Supported pause frame use: No
        Supports auto-negotiation: No
        Supported FEC modes: Not reported
        Advertised link modes:  Not reported
        Advertised pause frame use: No
        Advertised auto-negotiation: No
        Advertised FEC modes: Not reported
        Speed: 10000Mb/s
        Duplex: Full
        Auto-negotiation: off
        Port: Twisted Pair
        PHYAD: 0
        Transceiver: internal
        MDI-X: Unknown
        Supports Wake-on: uag
        Wake-on: d
        Link detected: yes

You quickly see that it is a network card that supports both 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps. The server in this example is running Debian 12 on our VMware platform.

If you run the same command with the -i option, you’ll get information about the driver.

Command

ethtool -i ens192

This command will show an output similar to this:

Output

driver: vmxnet3
version: 1.7.0.0-k-NAPI
firmware-version:
expansion-rom-version:
bus-info: 0000:0b:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: no
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no

On a physical machine with multiple network adapters, you make the adapter blink to identify itself so you can locate it. You use the -p option for this, like this:

Command

ethtool -p ens192 20