On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 08:13:36AM -0700, Mike Leo wrote:
My foggy'ness comes from a few things. 1. if the driver is built into the kernel, will it show up in lsmod?
No, because it's not a module.
2. if the driver does not show up in lsmod, how do i know if its loaded?
That largely depends on what it is, though generally you'll see related entries under /proc. If it's a filesystem for instance, you will see it listed under /proc/filesystems.
3. weather it's a built in driver or a module, how do i associate the driver (or module) with a particular device?
That depends on the driver. Most drivers are able to find their devices automatically. Others require kernel/module parameters to specify port, etc.
4. if the device does not have a driver in the kernel, I cannot build a custom kernel to include it, nor can I build it as a module from the kernel source. So: 5. if I get the driver from the vendor, it will build a module for me, based on my kernel-source or kernel-headers??? Then what? again, see #3: how do i associate the module with my device?
It will definitely need kernel-source or kernel-headers, whichever your distro uses. You'll end up with a compiled module (name.o). I haven't actually dealt with adding modules in ages, but as I recall you put the resulting module file under /lib/modules/... appropriately (/lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc ?) and run "depmod -a". At this point the module should be all set. There's probably docs from the vendor as well.
This is a general linux quandry, but this time i have a debian stable install and have inserted a QLogic HBA. lsmod does show qla2xxx, but it doesn't seem to be functioning as it isn't logging into the fiber switch.
Does the card show up in dmesg output / if you rmmod and then modprobe the module, do you see the card information? I never had to do anything special to get the HBA module (also Qlogic) loaded up and logged into the fabric as far as I can recall anyway. -- Randomly Generated Tagline: "I have not put in a single line of code into BIND 9. And I hope that's not why it's a thing of beauty." - Paul Vixie at LISA '99