I've never understood how you manage kernel modules at boot time

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 02:47:09AM -0500, Mike Oliver wrote:
> I've been looking through the documentation for modprobe and modprobe.conf
> and modprobe.d and so on and I just don't understand what's supposed
> to be the correct, intelligent way to cause a kernel module to be loaded
> at boot time.  The documentation for modprobe.conf and modprobe.d all
> seems to be about configuring what *happens* when you invoke
> "modprobe my-module", but doesn't seem to say anything about what
> *causes* that command to be invoked at boot time.
> 
> Also I don't get how the "alias" command comes into this.  I've seen
> various howtos that talk about putting an "alias" line into one of these
> config files, but they don't explain just why the aliased name gets
> probed in the first place.

On debian there is a file called /etc/modules which is a list of modules
to load at boot.

/etc/modprobe.conf should not be used since debian uses /etc/modprobe.d/
instead and if you create modprobe.conf it disables the modprobe.d
breaking lots of stuff.

Another way to make things load is with aliases such as:
alias char-major-195-* nvidia

That means whenever something tries to open a /dev node for major 195
then load the module named nvidia to try and provide such a device.

--
Len Sorensen
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