Re: [Sheflug] Network card installation

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Al" == Alex Hudson <home [at] alexhudson.com> writes:

    >> > Firstly, don't compile ethernet drivers into the kernel,
    >> unless you have > great reasons for doing so.
    >> 
    >> Excuse my ignorance, but why not?

    Al> 'Cos you get to choose options (irq, great for isa; duplex

I think you can mostly do this for the first eth device with LILO or
whatever.  But it's easier with modules, and you don't have to reboot
if you shoot a hole in your foot.

    Al> mode, etc., all sorts of things), you get to turn the hardware
    Al> on and off, and you don't lose anything.

Lose, lose, NFS root.  Lose.

That's the only one I know of, though.

The big problem with modules as opposed to in-kernel, as far as I'm
concerned, is the (as of a couple of months ago) complete lack of
findable documentation on how to get kmod (or kerneld, for ancient
kernels) to recognize a downcall as a request for a particular module.

It's simple: alias drivertype-major-minor modulename in the
modules.conf.  But it's nowhere documented, nor is how to figure out
which type-major-minor is used for which modules
(Documentation/drivers.txt IIRC).

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