Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual page 585

Chapter 41.
General Parameters and Modules
This chapter is provided to illustrate some of the possible parameters available for common hardware
1
device drivers , which under Red Hat Enterprise Linux are called kernel modules. In most cases,
the default parameters do work. However, there may be times when extra module parameters are
necessary for a device to function properly or to override the module's default parameters for the
device.
During installation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses a limited subset of device drivers to create a stable
installation environment. Although the installation program supports installation on many different
types of hardware, some drivers (including those for SCSI adapters and network adapters) are not
included in the installation kernel. Rather, they must be loaded as modules by the user at boot time.
Once installation is completed, support exists for a large number of devices through kernel modules.
Important
Red Hat provides a large number of unsupported device drivers in groups of packages
called kernel-smp-unsupported-<kernel-version> and kernel-hugemem-
unsupported-<kernel-version>. Replace <kernel-version> with the version
of the kernel installed on the system. These packages are not installed by the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux installation program, and the modules provided are not supported by Red
Hat, Inc.
41.1. Kernel Module Utilities
A group of commands for managing kernel modules is available if the module-init-tools package
is installed. Use these commands to determine if a module has been loaded successfully or when
trying different modules for a piece of new hardware.
The command /sbin/lsmod displays a list of currently loaded modules. For example:
Module
tun
autofs4
hidp
rfcomm
l2cap
bluetooth
sunrpc
dm_mirror
dm_mod
video
sbs
i2c_ec
container
button
battery
asus_acpi
ac
ipv6
A driver is software which enables Linux to use a particular hardware device. Without a driver, the kernel cannot communicate
with attached devices.
Size Used by
11585 1
21573 1
16193 2
37849 0
23873 10 hidp,rfcomm
50085 5 hidp,rfcomm,l2cap
153725 1
29073 0
57433 1 dm_mirror
17221 0
16257 0
5569 1 sbs
4801 0
7249 0
10565 0
16857 0
5701 0
246113 12
559