hi mike, i read your email and found it very useful. a few questions remain:
> If you run> lsmod it will show you all loaded modules(e.g. eepro)
> and > modprobe -l will show all your available modules.
> When the kernel needs a feature that is not resident in the kernel, it
> sends a request to Kmod, which then uses modprobe to load a module.
> Modprobe looks for an alias line in /etc/modules.conf to find a
> match,
can you be more precise about this step? looking through /etc/modules.conf,
i assume kmod hands modprobe something like:
"char-major-10-130", "/dev/ppp" or "cipher-3"
and then modprobe finds the lines:
alias cipher-3 fish2
alias /dev/ppp ppp_generic
alias char-major-10-130 softdog
and then hands "fish2.o", "ppp_generic.o" and "softdog.o" to insmod?
> and insmod is then asked to insert the module the kernel needs.
> You do not edit /etc/modules.conf directly, but instead put the alias
> lines (alias eth0 eepro.o) in /etc/modutils and then run> update-modules
> which regenerates the correct alias in /etc/modules.conf.
just for my own knowledge, is this (running update-modules to update
modules.conf) the way things are done on other distributions too?
> When the modules are installed a dependency file is created with
> depmod in /lib/modules/*version*/modules.dep, so modprobe knows all the
> correct modules it needs to load for a requested feature.
so make modules_install runs depmod -a automatically?
> There is another file you can edit directly: /etc/modules with
> any modules to be loaded at boot time. So these are always loaded, where
> as the modules in /etc/modules.conf are loaded only when needed.
again, just for my own curiosity, do other distributions also autoload
modules on boot using /etc/modules?
thank you for posting this email. i found it extremely helpful.
pete
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