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

[Mike Oliver]

Quoting "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday-L09J2beyid0N/H6P543EQg at public.gmane.org>:

> well, it's the job of kernel code to "register" for a major device
> number and possibly multiple minor numbers with a call to, say,
> "register_chrdev".  if that call succeeds, then a record of that is
> made in /proc/devices:
>
> $ cat /proc/devices
> Character devices:
>  1 mem
>  4 /dev/vc/0
>  4 tty
>  4 ttyS
>  5 /dev/tty
>  5 /dev/console
>  5 /dev/ptmx
>  7 vcs
> 10 misc
> 13 input
> 14 sound
> 21 sg
> 29 fb
> 81 video4linux
> ...
>
>  in addition, in the old days, once that succeeded, it was still
> *your* job to use "mknod" to create a device file with the appropriate
> attributes.
>
>  these days, that's normally done automatically via "udev" and the
> udev rules.  but in terms of where the whole process starts, it's the
> kernel code that gets things rolling by attempting to allocate a major
> device number as above.

OK, getting somewhere, I think.  So how do I set things up so that
the kernel registers a new device at boot time,
that it isn't currently registering?

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