It is also common to manually consult the current dmesg buffer after hot-plugging devices, particularly USB devices (especially thumb drives), to determine whether the device has been recognized, the data rate of the port involved (USB 2 and USB 3.0 plugs sit side by side and are hard to distinguish on many systems), what driver has been assigned, and where the device is made visible in the file system. Many distributions attempt to display device-recognition messages on the desktop, often through a taskbar pop-up, but this is not always reliable or the information presented is incomplete. (Furthermore, to be notified on the desktop, the hot-plugged device must be permitted by the system's security policy.)