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1. Introduction

Inspiration for this paper came from Paul Gortmaker's excellent BootPrompt-HOWTO. With Paul's permission I have used his paper as a framework, upon which I have grafted my ramblings. Different parts of this paper have been shamelessly, without any permissions what so ever, ripped off from various README and *.txt files within The Source Tree. My sincere thanks for all the authors of those texts which have made this document possible.

This paper generally follows the same structure/module order as the kernel configuration utility menuconfig when run in single_menu_mode=TRUE mode.

All sections which are marked Modular in the configuration utility are included here, regardless whether they have option parameters or not.

Each section follows the example outline below: 

Load command:
        /sbin/modprobe ne.o io=0x300 irq=5

        io = 0          (Explicitly *requires* an "io=0xNNN" value)
        irq = 0         (Tries to determine configured IRQ via autoIRQ)
        (Probes ports: 0x300, 0x280, 0x320, 0x340, 0x360)

        Depends on 8390.o

The Module-HOWTO is edited and maintained by:

Lauri Tischler, ltischler@efore.fi

1.1 Disclaimer and Copyright

This document is not gospel. However, it is probably the most up to date info that you will be able to find. Nobody is responsible for what happens to your hardware but yourself. If your hardware goes up in smoke (...nearly impossible!) I take no responsibility. ie. THE AUTHOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES INCURRED DUE TO ACTIONS TAKEN BASED ON THE INFORMATION INCLUDED IN THIS DOCUMENT.

This document is Copyright (c) 1996 by Lauri Tischler. Permisson is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this document under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that this copyright notice is included exactly as in the original, and that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this document into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions.

If you are intending to incorporate this document into a published work, please contact me, and I will make an effort to ensure that you have the most up to date information available. In the past, out of date versions of the Linux howto documents have been published, which caused the developers undue grief from being plagued with questions that were already answered in the up to date versions.

1.2 Related Documentation

Following HOWTO's are highly recommended :

The file Documentation/Configure.help gives good general information about what parts of the kernel to modularize or not.

Also plethora of various README files, sprinkled (unfortunately) all over The Source Tree are good and informative reading.

The most up-to-date documentation will always be The Kernel Source itself. For example, if you were looking for what parameters could be passed to the smc-ultra ethernetcard, then you would go to the linux/drivers/net directory, and look at the file smc-ultra.c -- usually somewhere in the end of the file you would find a procedure called init_module. Within this procedure or around it you will parameter and structure definitions related to module parameters.

1.3 The Linux Newsgroups

If you have questions about passing parameters to modules at load time, please READ this document first. If this and the related documentation mentioned above does not answer your question(s) then you can try the Linux newsgroups.

General questions on how to configure your system should be directed to comp.os.linux.setup. We ask that you please respect this general guideline for content, and don't cross-post your request to other groups.

1.4 New Versions of Document

New versions of this document can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from sunsite.unc.edu, in /pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/* and various Linux ftp mirror sites. Updates will be made as new information or drivers becomes available. If this copy that you are reading is more than 3 months old, it is either out of date, or it means that I have been lazy and haven't updated it.

This document was produced by using the SGML system that was specifically set up for the Linux Howto project, and there are various output formats available, including, postscript, dvi, ascii, html, and soon TeXinfo.

I would recommend viewing it in the html (via a WWW browser) or the Postscript/dvi format. Both of these contain cross-references that are lost in the ascii translation.

If you want to get the official copy off sunsite, here is URL.

Module-HOWTO

1.5 Experimental (alpha-code) modules or incomplete information.

Here is a list of modules which are declared experimental in configuration scripts or otherwise have incomplete info or I'm just too dumb to understand The Source. Pick your choice.

1.6 History.

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