Can a non-existent driver be used for a device?

Question

linux

Linux Mint 18.2, the infamous Realtek RT3290 card.
The output of lspci and inxi says that the rt2860 driver is used for RT3290:
lspci -v

03:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT3290 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe
  Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. RT3290 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe
  Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
  Memory at f7810000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
  Capabilities: <access denied>
  Kernel driver in use: rt2860
  Kernel modules: rt2800pci, rt3290sta

inxi-N

Network:   Card-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169
           Card-2: Ralink RT3290 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe driver: rt2860

But lsmod does not show such a driver and sudo rmmod rt2860 does not allow you to remove this driver.
sudo rmmod rt2860

rmmod: ERROR: Module rt2860 is not currently loaded

Please tell me, how can this be? There are some problems with the connection (the Internet suddenly disappears), I thought maybe this is the reason.

Answer 1

This can happen if the driver is hardwired into the kernel and not loaded as a module.