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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