Re: Patch to support drivers compiled into the kernel

[Kay Sievers <kay sievers vrfy org>]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 16:21, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 09:54 -0500, Bill C Riemers wrote:
>> Currently, NetworkManager ignores any network driver that does not have
>> a loadable module associated with it.   This is a problem, when the
>> network driver has been compiled directly into the kernel.  This is
>> typically done for coLinux, and other environments where a loadable
>> module network driver is not supported.
>>
>> The following patch marks the driver for such devices as "<kernel>", so
>> that NetworkManager will not ignore them.   However, NetworkManager will
>> still ignore network devices which do not have a driver associated with
>> them and is not built-in as part of the kernel.
>>
>> Note: I created this patch on Fedora 10, against the 0.7.0-1 version.
>> Please let me know if I need to do a git checkout and rebuild this patch
>> against the current code base.
>
> Hmm, I'd like to see what sysfs looks like for these devices; do you
> have a /sys/class/net/ethX/device directory for that device, and if so,
> what's in it?

There should be no difference, maybe some "module" link does not exist
if it's built-in, but usually even they are created.

These days, even /sys/module/ should be identical for modules and
built-in code, besides the "refcount" and the sections "attributes"
which only exist for loadable modules.

Kay