Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz

So, you've always been annoyed by the fact that you have to load all those laptop, i2c, hwmon, hdaps Linux kernel modules manually without having spiffy udev doing that work for you automagically? No more! I just sent a patch to LKML which adds DMI/SMBIOS-based module autoloading to the Linux kernel.

Hopefully this patch will be integrated into Linus' kernel shortly. As soon as that happens udev will automatically recognize your laptop/mainboard model and load the relevant modules.

Module maintainers, please add MODULE_ALIAS lines to your kernel modules to make sure that they are autoloaded using this new mechanism, as soon as it gets commited in Linus' kernel.

For a fully automatically configured system only ACPI-DSDT-based module autoloading is missing. I.e. load the "battery" module only when an ACPI battery is actually around.

posted at: 22:16 | path: /projects | permanent link to this entry | 5 comments

Posted by joey at Wed May 9 00:14:42 2007
Would that include CPU scaling modules?

Posted by Lennart at Wed May 9 00:44:54 2007
joey: afaik the CPU scaling modules are autoloaded already, aren't they?

If not we should probably also add CPU-type based module autoloading.

Posted by Andy Grover at Thu May 10 08:09:52 2007
Whoah, nice. Although I think once you have loading based on DSDT, loading from DMI is not needed (after all, ACPI was meant to be used for auto loading drivers, whereas DMI wasn't, to say the least)

Definitely a step in the right direction though. Cheers!

Posted by Lennart at Thu May 10 11:45:07 2007
Andy: The problem is that i2c, hwmon, hdaps and some laptop drivers (such as my msi-laptop.c) access functionality of the ACPI EC without using the ACPI DSDT code (because there is none). Hence loading modules solely based on DSDT is not enough.

Posted by joey at Thu May 10 23:02:27 2007
I might be mistaken, but I don't think that the CPU scaling modules are autoloaded currently.

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Tue, 08 May 2007

DMI-based Autoloading of Linux Kernel Modules