what are modules? (specifically, nvaudio + intel810, and autoloading)
 

i know that this is a pretty newbie question... and i do sort of know the answer already, i would just like some clarification: what are modules? i know that they are pieces of code that you can load into the kernel in memory, and that they have to do with device drivers.

but how do they work? i installed alsa sound drivers for my card today, and had some hassling around with nvaudio. i was getting errors when trying to do "alsasound start":
init_module: no such device
insmod snd-intel8x0.o failed
insmod snd-card-0 failed
after reading up on various places (LQ.org included) i tried to first "modprobe -r nvaudio" and then set up alsa and intel8x0, and sound worked.

what exactly happened?

and now when i boot i get errors about not being able to load some sound related modules, one of which is nvaudio and another of which is intel810. but i can play music with xmms, which i could not do before setting up alsa.

what i want to know is, how do i control what modules get loaded at boot, so i can stop these errors? and i am curious about modules because i am relatively new to linux and am trying to learn as much as i can.

i am using gentoo and kernel 2.4, if that matters. i can post more of the messages, although dmesg does not help much (each error that i read while the system boots is condensed to a single line in dmesg that has the date/time and the name of the module or driver maker or something)

thank you very much, any i am very very grateful for any insight/advice/education

mgyamada

run alsaconf as root if it fails then you may need to edit your your /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf manually but there's lots of help on these forums.