On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 10:49, Rex Johnston wrote:
Jim Cheetham wrote:
I've got a couple of kernel-related questions ...
In a server environment, for drivers that are not essential for booting (i.e. scsi or ide), do you think kernel modules are preferable to built-in drivers?
Yes, you can load/unload/rebuild them on the fly.
Handy for experimentation, but not necessarily a compelling argument for a server that's supposed to be stable :-)
No-one is perfect. If you absolutely need to patch something without affecting another service, then modules are the only way to go.
On the other hand, i've seen initrd fail and on boot, it's unable to mount the root fs. Compile fs support in folks.
I was considering banning loadable modules, to increase protection against r00tkits ...
Pretty minor increase in security.
However, just this morning I identified the cause of a transient problem by identifying a troublesome driver (i.e. rtl8139 as opposed to 8139too) because it was visible in lsmod ...
Ah yes, been there done that. Troublesome? I couldn't even get rtl8139 to even talk to the card.
How can I discover the drivers present in a running kernel?
alright then zcat /proc/config.gz & figure it out yer`self.
dmesg is a limited-length buffer, and the announcements from boot time are often lost.
Then set up your own syslogd.conf & cron.*ly :)
Cheers, Rex
