HOWTO: load up 3rd party kernel modules at boot-up

[Paul Howarth]

On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 01:26 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 5/26/05, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org> wrote:
> > Have a look at this bug report and its resolution:
> > 
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=123927
> > 
> > The idea is that in the upcoming Fedora Core 4 there will be an
> > "official" way to load up arbitrary kernel modules when the system boots
> > up - simply create a *.modules file in /etc/sysconfig/modules and make
> > it executable. Whatever you put into that file will be executed when the
> > system boots up.
> > 
> > For example, you probably noticed that the PC speaker does not work
> > (it's a bug reported very long time ago that was never fixed). You can
> > patch that bug with a simple script in the /etc/sysconfig/modules
> > directory, called pcspeaker.modules, with the following content:
> > 
> > #!/bin/sh
> > /sbin/modprobe pcspkr
> > 
> > Don't forget to do this after creating the file:
> > 
> > chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/pcspeaker.modules
> > 
> > Reboot, then enjoy your PC speaker. ;-)
> > 
> > I tested this method with FC4 test 3 and it works fine.
> > It does not work with FC3 since the supporting bits are not in place.
> > 
> > --
> > Florin Andrei
> 
> Having the PC speaker not work isn't a bug- it's a feature!
> 
> This isn't windows, so why should we reboot? I'm pretty sure that
> there's something that you can restart without rebooting. And anyway,
> there IS a 'fix' to this for FC3, I just don't remember it at the
> moment. Google probably does. As one who cut the wire to the PC
> speaker 3 operating systems ago, I never cared to 'fix' it.

The OP was describing the new "official" method of having modules load
automatically at boot time (ones that aren't loaded automatically as
part of the hardware detection process). Running the script at any time
should produce the same effect. The point is that the script will be run
automatically *if* you do a reboot, so you don't have to do anything
else manually to enable for instance the PC speaker, *if* you want to
enable it. Nobody is saying (a) that the PC speaker should be enabled by
default, or (b) that the machine would need to be rebooted to enable it.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>