Re: A modules question

[mike polniak <mikpolniak@adelphia.net>]

> 
> In any case, I installed "stable" on this machine and all went well. It has an
> Intel Etherxpress Pro 100 NIC in it, which requires the eepro module to be loaded.
> 
> I do this during install, and it is installed "permanently" such that when I reboot
> the machine it's reloaded.
> 
> But I can't find any trace of how it's done! I don't see it in /etc/modules.conf,
> which in turn points me to the /etc/modules.conf directory. But a grep -I eep in
> that directory reveals no trace of this module.
> 
> How does this work? And how can I _keep_ it workign after upgradeing?
		
	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, 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.
	 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.
	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.

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