[TAG] I love Linux

[Thomas Adam]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 12:18:17PM -0600, Jason Creighton wrote:
> source-tree[3]. Is that a good idea? I mean, everything *appears* to
> work fine, but will enabling a module ever require you to rebuild the
> kernel itself?

No, not unless the module relies on an option that you need to statically
compile into the kernel and have not already done so -- an isolated case, so
you should be fine.

As to whether it is a good idea, module loading works by looking at the
module's symbol information, which matches the version of your current running
kernel. If the version of the module is the same as `uname -r`, then it will
load quite happily, whether it was compiled at the same time as the kernel or
ten months afterwards.

> [2] It occurs to me as I write this that I could have typed
> "make modules modules_install" but oh well.

Yes.

> [3] Correct term? I mean, I extracted the linux-2.4.20 tarball to
> /usr/src, and I built these modules from that as well as the kernel I'm
> running now.

Correct term. You should also run 'depmod -a' after the modules_install part
so that the kernel knows of their existence properly.

-- Thomas Adam

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