From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 7 8:36:15 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from e2.ny.us.ibm.com (e2.ny.us.ibm.com [32.97.182.102]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E5581522E for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:36:12 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ravikm@us.ibm.com) Received: from southrelay02.raleigh.ibm.com (southrelay02.raleigh.ibm.com [9.37.3.209]) by e2.ny.us.ibm.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA18286 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:35:30 -0400 From: ravikm@us.ibm.com Received: from d54mta07.raleigh.ibm.com (d54mta07.raleigh.ibm.com [9.67.228.39]) by southrelay02.raleigh.ibm.com (8.8.8m2/NCO v2.05) with SMTP id LAA59700 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:35:54 -0400 Received: by d54mta07.raleigh.ibm.com(Lotus SMTP MTA v4.6.5 (863.2 5-20-1999)) id 85256803.0055B116 ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:35:58 -0400 X-Lotus-FromDomain: IBMUS To: FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org Message-ID: <85256803.0055ADBB.00@d54mta07.raleigh.ibm.com> Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 10:34:16 -0500 Subject: Loadable drivers in FreeBSD and NetBSD Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi! We are trying to see if we can convert the drivers in our NetBSD implementation into loadable drivers so that we can reduce the size of the kernel. I know that in Linux, we can achieve this by adding the entry and exit points - init_module() and cleanup_module(), and adding the MODULE flag to the compiles for the driver code. Then we should be able to add and remove them dynamically using the commands "insmod" and "rmmod". How does it work on the NetBSD and FreeBSD. Do we need to add the same routines in the drivers and compile them with the MODULE flag? Also, would the kernel then not have these drivers statically linked? Is the dynamic loadability feature supported in the NetBSD 1.4/1.5 kernels? Can these drivers be hot-loaded at runtime, or do they need to be explicitly loaded using some commands such as "insmod" or so. Your help is very much appreciated. Thanks. Ravi Mandava To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message