Hy.
I'm currently having some problems with module loading. When i compile something as a module and later load that module the process hangs .. without beeing able to kill it. On the other hand when compiling as kernel module everything goes fine.
I'll give you an example: I compiled block devices - loopback as module and then i tried mounting an iso image with mount -o loop and the process hanged. When compilin loopback as kernel module mount -o loop worked perfectly.

Please help me solve this thing out. Here's a part of my kernel configuration. I think this could be the problem ...


#
# loadable module support
#
config_modules=y
config_module_unload=y
config_module_force_unload=y
config_obsolete_modparm=y
# config_modversions is not set
# config_module_srcversion_all is not set
config_kmod=y
config_stop_machine=y

I hope this helps .. i'm sorry if i didn't make it clear enough

explain what a "module" is that's not a "kernel module"
do you mean the difference between "y" and "m"
in the config ?
if you put "m" then before you can use the module you must do
modprobe <module>
if you have a modern system that uses "udev" to dynamically create device nodes then the equation is a bit more complicated.

Yes .. that's what i ment. Using y works .. using m no.
Also i'm running gentoo .. freshly installed 2 weeks ago.

first i don't really see any reason to make the loopback device "m" really ever
beyond that since udev systems are new to everyone and loading modules is a little difficult
i recomend starting out only making the sound system and the video driver if needed (if it's third party)
as "m". The sound system doesn't work right if it's built in and you obviously can't build in third party modules without patching the kernel.
once you learn to load those then it seems esier and you can try other loadable modules.



a couple of things to check

you need module-init-tools not modutils for a 2.6 series kernel

what's going on:
because of udev all modules you need i think should be loaded explicitly at boot with
/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
so you get the device nodes in /dev
i think for this to work you also need hotplug enabled as "y" in the kernel config
the way this works is before udev starts if you load the module it triggers a hotplug event
that get cued so devices get made as modules are loaded later (i think)
otherwise when you try to load a module it won't load because there is no device node and there is no device node bacause the module won't load (stuck in a module udev catch 22)

(i don't use gentoo so i don't know all the details)
gentoo seems to also have a folder /etc/modules.d that takes aliases and what not -- not sure how that works

Compiling the sound driver as "m" causes stability problems and often crashes of my system. I really think something's wrong with my configuration. I'm a bit of a newbie and i compiled my whole system from scratch so i could have made some mistakes...

Also i tried to install the alsa sound driver from alsa's home page and everything goes fine untill i run the command modules-update, when the system hangs.
wtf ?

if i were you i would repost this problem with the word gentoo in the title
this needs someone with specific gentoo experience
and ask on the gentoo boards

to me -- i tried to read the gentoo docs -- geeeez
those guys got monster build_foo but they make the linux thing way more complicated than it needs to be

Problem solved by upgrading to kernel 2.6.11