Re: Patch to support drivers compiled into the kernel

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 18:38 +0100, Kay Sievers wrote:
> 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.

Yeah; it used to be the case that drivers wouldn't call the right bits
to get the device link which would then provide the driver.  I'm not
convinced the patch is the right way to go until we figure out if the
driver is the culprit.

Dan