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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 02:40:04PM -0500, Mike Oliver wrote:
> OK, this is some help, thanks; I'll look at my /dev directory when I get
> home.  But I still don't understand the sequence of events.  I *don't*
> try to open /dev/nvidia0; it's some script at boot time that does that,
> I suppose (or would if I used nVidia), but I don't know which script or
> how to find it.  Grepping through the various /etc/rcN.d/ directories is
> tedious and has not historically seemed to turn up what I'm looking for,
> quite possibly because I don't *know* what I'm looking for.

The nvidia X server uses /dev/nvidia0.

With more systems going to udev with a dynamic /dev, there aren't static
entries for a lot of things anymore, so the modules have to be loaded
some other way, often by detecting PCI device IDs and loading modules
that support those IDs (udev does this), or by listing the module
explicitly for load at boot (which /dev/modules does on debian, not sure
about other systems.  modprobe.d/modprobe.conf does not have anything to
do with that.)

--
Len Sorensen
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