Map of boot procedure

[Gary Coulbourne]

On Dec 17, 2005, at 11:52 AM, Doug Crompton wrote:

> To make a long story short after trying to figure out why I ended up
> adding the base sound card module load in /etc/sysconfig/kernel in  
> which I
> discovered has a place to load modules that were not hardware detected
> properly.

It depends, really.  I've never trusted automatic configuration, and  
usually just build the kernel with the devices I have built-in.   
However, each distribution has its own way of handling it.  Most  
current distributions use hotplug/coldplug for autoloading, though --  
where particular devices in the /dev directory can be associated with  
automatically loadable modules, and that sort of thing.  I'm still  
not fully converted in my thinking from devfs, and so I don't  
remember all of the udev syntax, but I believe there's a way to set  
it up to use that.

I did a little looking around on what SUSE uses.  /etc/sysconfig/ 
kernel is for those modules required for booting.   Some people on  
the mailing lists recommended putting modprobe commands in /etc/ 
init.d/boot.local, appending them, like:   echo "/usr/sbin/modprobe  
sndcardmodule" >> /etc/init.d/boot.local

I suspect hotplug is the "right" way to do it, but I'm not really up  
to speed on the configuration or if SUSE is using it.  Here's a page  
on it: http://lwn.net/Articles/123932/

And Here's a page on SUSE's booting:
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/doc/suse/suse9.2/suselinux- 
adminguide_en/ch10.html

Peace,
Gary