Won't work unless complied directly in the kernel

Clark Bent · 03-27-2005, 11:49 AM

I had a simple question that I thought one of you might know the answer to. In my travels, I have noticed that some types of hardware don't quite funciton in a optimal manner unless the driver is compliled directly in to the kernel. Why is that?

For example, I was trying to enable DMA on my laptop hd...but I couldn't get it to go. The module for my IDE controller was loading and listed when I did lsmod. But until I compiled it right into the kernel, I could not get my DMA to come on. Why is that?

cylix · 03-27-2005, 12:52 PM

If you load a module after the controller is initialized, you will have to set the parameters with the hdparm utility.

Compared to being compiled in... it's always there so when initializing the controller it can use DMA at the time of check.

Things like that I tend to compile in and anything I can label as "doesn't need this to boot" gets thrown into a module.

Half_Elf · 03-27-2005, 01:09 PM

some hardware drivers act better as modules, some are better compiled in... It depends on the hardware, the only way to know is to read about it. Usually, you better compile in what you need at boot (unless you want to mess with initrd, which is an unnecessary pain atmo), as example IDE chipset and filesystem drivers and to compile as module drivers that might need extra paramaters or that you might need to unload, as example ram disk size can only be changed if you give the module a certain parameter on load.

Clark Bent · 03-27-2005, 01:20 PM

Thank you both for your replies. Makes sense to me. Are you really running all those variations of Slackware Half_Elf?

Half_Elf · 03-27-2005, 02:49 PM

LOL
not right now but I used too. 8.0 was my great love but I had to switch to 9.0 when Win98 killed my linux partition (3-4 years go?). I had a "testing" box running Slackware 8.1 for a long time (the hdd died last years, it's an useless piece of metal now). This box was running 9.0 'til 2 month ago when I switched to Gentoo. I still have the Slackware on another partition, for now...

Clark Bent · 03-27-2005, 06:43 PM

8 was my great love too. It was the first time I had ran slack and it was quite the good vintage was it not? And if I recall 9 did not strike me as being as good for some reason. I just loved 8 though. I actually migrated from Slack to Debian. And I really liked it. Then I tried Gentoo...which I liked as well. Well, not long ago I decided to give Slack 10.1 a go. It wasn't as nice as 8. I don't know how or why that is remotely possible. But 8 was the stuff.