Re: sound question

["Daniel Pittman" <daniel@rimspace.net>]

Francois Gouget <fgouget@free.fr> writes:
>
> On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, David Reviejo wrote: [...]
>> % modutils (2.3.11-6)...
>> %
>> % * Don't install modclean anymore. It worked, but the current
>> %   implementation ignores post and pre-remove commands in
>> %   modules.conf. Upstream plans to have a proper solution for 2.3.12
>> %   instead.
>>
>> So, it seems we have no autoclean for kernel modules on Potato.
>
>    Case in point: my sound driver has been marked '0 (autoclean)' for
> the past 8 hours and it's still there. There's not much autoclean.

Indeed. 

>    Is modclean installed? 'type modclean' does not find it and 'dpkg
>    -S modclean' only finds 'modclean.8.gz'.
>
>    Also I'm a bit confused. My network card is marked '1 (autoclean)'.
> Does that mean that modclean would unload it? Or would it be prevented
> from doing so by the '1'?

No. The number in that column is a reference count. Modules that are not
marked 'autoclean' would never be removed automatically. Modules that
/are/ marked 'autoclean' *and* that have a reference count of zero would
be removed.
k>
>    Also my masquerading modules are all marked '0 (unused)'. I assume
> the difference is that I did an insmod so they won't be unloaded even
> if they are not in use. 

Yes.

> Would there be a way to load them on demand instead? Like if one of
> the clients on my network does an ftp then the kernel would load
> 'ip_masq_ftp'? And five minutes later (or whenever I run autoclean) it
> would unload the module.

Maybe. It depends on the kernel requesting the relevant modules at the
right time. In the case of the masqerading modules, I don't _think_
there is a way to autoload them.

>    I guess I'm dreaming.

Does the memory use really bother you that much? It's generally less
than 200k, maximum, on any machine I ever saw....

Anyway, if you *really* want to have automatic unloading of modules, you
could run 'modprobe -r'[1] or 'rmmod -a' in a cron job. Do that as root
and it should automatically prune modules for you.

        Daniel


Footnotes: 
[1]  I have modutils from unstable installed; this may or may not work
     in stable.

-- 
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