Kernal Question

[Rustylinux]

Hey,

Whats the diffrence when your setting up your kernal in menuconfig between installing as a module and adding it to the kernal ? For instnace say you are adding in a NIC driver you can press spacebar and it puts a M in the [] to add it as a module or you can press Y and it installs it into the kernal ?

Any major diffrences / benifts for doing either or ?

[forgotten1]

If you install it in the kernel, then the item will be built in, meaning support for the device will be available as the kernel boots up.

If you install it as a module, then the support for the device will not be available until the module is loaded.

Generally, any device necessary to boot the computer should be built in. This would include stuff like the drive support, filesystem support, etc.

To load device modules at boot (that aren't built into the kernel), you could use an application like coldplug, or add the device module names to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 (or kernel-2.4 if you are using it).

The reason some folks will use device modules instead of building support into the kernel, is the kernel device support code does not get refreshed as fast as the some separate device modules.

I hope this helps, and has not confused you more.
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[Rustylinux]

Yeah, thanks for clearing that up. Pretty well the only advantage for loading it as a module instead of installing it as part of the kernal is the updates are a little quicker. So for something like a Video card module this might be an option, all though I'm just going to add it into the kernal.

[nixnut]

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Duplicate Threads.
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