Baslinux mailing list

[<keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>]

How large is modprobe?  Seems like it would have saved some time here.
Or does BL2 already have a way to determine dependencies of modules?

To answer my earlier question about kernel sizes, I did my own homework. 
The BL2 kernel is about 512K and the bare.i kernel (needed in order to
install sound modules) about 894K. Would the relative amounts of RAM
occupied by the kernel be 894/512, or is there a lot of RAM freed when the
devices for which the kernel has drivers are not present?  I notice that
during bootup about 30K of RAM are freed on my computer (which has no PCI
slots). 

I am still curious (but don't have a compiler to determine for myself) 
how many bytes are added to a kernel if you compile it to support adding
sound modules, and how much this feature adds to RAM usage if there is no
sound card present and no sound modules are actually loaded.

Do I understand correctly that the BL2 kernel was compiled to support
adding network modules but not to contain the actual network drivers?  And
that lowram.i will not work for BL2 users who want to go online because it
does not support adding the ppp module? 

Learning the little bit I know about Linux has helped make some sense out
of the lengthy hardware and software discussions at my bbs.  There was a
discussion of various software solutions to get around the problem of not
booting because of some IRQ conflict with an onboard sound controller -
someone who sells hardware finally suggested disabling it in CMOS as the
simplest solution.  Eventually someone else recompiled the kernel without
a large number of drivers which are irrelevant to running a text-only (no
sound or pictures)  bbs.  This is a new computer with 1.5G RAM so the RAM
usage was not the problem, just the conflicts between drivers.  They are
switching from SunOS 4 to OpenBSD so as to be able to used precompiled
binaries, but the right kernel for a bbs was not available.  


On Wed, 21 May 2003 qwms-avib AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Ron Clarke wrote:
> > 
> > >> -------------------------
> > >> insmod sound trace_init=1
> > >> -------------------------
> > 
> > insmod: unresolved symbol sound_preinit_lowlevel_drivers
> > insmod: unresolved symbol unregister_sound_dsp
> > insmod: unresolved symbol sound_unload_lowlevel_drivers
> > insmod: unresolved symbol unregister_sound_midi
> > insmod: unresolved symbol register_sound_dsp
> > insmod: unresolved symbol register_sound_mixer
> > insmod: unresolved symbol unregister_sound_mixer
> > insmod: unresolved symbol unregister_sound_special
> > insmod: unresolved symbol register_sound_special
> > insmod: unresolved symbol sound_init_lowlevel_drivers
> > insmod: unresolved symbol register_sound_midi
> 
> Ah... those look like missing dependencies.  So I looked
> in /modules/2.2.16/modules.dep and found that (yes) sound.o
> does have two dependencies:  soundcore.o and soundlow.o.
> So try this:
> -------------------------
> insmod soundcore
> insmod soundlow
> insmod sound trace_init=1
> -------------------------
> 
> Sorry about this problem.  My information on sound.o was
> for the 2.0 kernel, which does not have those dependencies.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steven
> 
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux
>