How Do Modules Get Into The Kernel? You can see what modules are already loaded into the kernel by running lsmod, which gets its information by reading the file /proc/modules. How do these modules find their way into the kernel? When the kernel needs a feature that is not resident in the kernel, the kernel module daemon kmod[1] execs modprobe to load the module in. modprobe is passed a string in one of two forms: A module name like softdog or ppp. • A more generic identifier like char-major-10-30. • If modprobe is handed a generic identifier, it first looks for that string in the file /etc/modprobe.conf.[2] If it finds an alias line like: alias char-major-10-30 softdog it knows that the generic identifier refers to the module softdog.ko. Next, modprobe looks through the file /lib/modules/version/modules.dep, to see if other modules must be loaded before the requested module may be loaded. This file is created by depmod -a and contains module dependencies….

To avoid these two problems, I highly recommend that you download, compile and boot into a fresh, stock Linux kernel which can be downloaded from any of the Linux kernel mirror sites. See the Linux Kernel HOWTO for more details. Ironically, this can also cause a problem. By default, gcc on your system may look for the kernel headers in their default location rather than where you installed the new copy of the kernel (usually in /usr/src/. This can be fixed by using gcc’s -I switch. The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide… 2.1.1. Introducing printk() Despite what you might think, printk() was not meant to communicate information to the user, even though we used it for exactly this purpose in hello-1! It happens to be a logging mechanism for the kernel, and is used to log information or give warnings. Therefore, each printk() statement comes with a priority, which is the <1> and KERN_ALERT you see. There are 8 priorities and the kernel has macros for them, so you don’t have to use cryptic numbers, and you can view them (and their meanings) in linux/kernel. h. If you don’t specify a priority level, the default priority, DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LOGLEVEL, will be used. Take time to read through the priority macros. The header file also describes what each priority means. In practise, don’t use number, like <4>. Always use the macro, like KERN_WARNING. If the priority is less than int console_loglevel, the message is printed on your current terminal. If both syslogd and klogd are running, then the message will also get appended to /var/log/messages, whether it got printed to the console or not. We use a high priority, like KERN_ALERT, to make sure the printk() messages get printed to your console rather than just logged to your logfile. When you write real modules, you’ll want to use priorities that are meaningful for the situation at hand. 2.2. Compiling Kernel Modules Kernel modules need to be compiled a bit differently from regular userspace apps. Former kernel versions required us to care much about these settings, which are usually stored in Makefiles. Although hierarchically organized, many redundant settings accumulated in sublevel Makefiles and made them large and rather difficult to maintain. Fortunately, there is a new way of doing these things, called kbuild, and the build process for external loadable modules is now fully integrated into the standard kernel build mechanism. To learn more on how to compile modules which are not part of the official kernel (such as all the examples you’ll find in this guide), see file linux/Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt. So, let’s look at a simple Makefile for compiling a module named hello-1.c: Example 2-2. Makefile for a basic kernel module obj-m += hello-1.o all: make -C /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build M=$(PWD) modules clean: make -C /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build M=$(PWD) clean From a technical point of view just the first line is really necessary, the “all” and “clean” targets were added for pure convenience. Now you can compile the module by issuing the command make . You should obtain an output which resembles the following: hostname:~/lkmpg-examples/02-HelloWorld# make make -C /lib/modules/2.6.11/build M=/root/lkmpg-examples/02-HelloWorld modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.11′ CC [M] /root/lkmpg-examples/02-HelloWorld/hello-1.o Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide

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