rc.d script to load kernel modules

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 11:11 PM, Eir Nym <eirnym at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 June 2011 22:17, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> Per discussion on -arch and the svn list about improving boot time and
>> stripping down the kernel to just that-which-cannot-be-modularized I created
>> the attached script to kldload modules that don't need to be in loader.conf.
>> It cut quite a bit of time off my boot, so hopefully it will be useful to
>> others as well.
>>
>> To use it just put everything that is being _load'ed in loader.conf into
>> kld_list in rc.conf[.local]. For example, mine has:
>>
>> kld_list='umass coretemp ichwd linux nvidia if_wpi'
>>
>> If there is agreement that this is a good direction to go I'll be happy to
>> commit this along with the relevant /etc/defaults/rc.conf and rc.conf.5
>> changes.
>>
>
> How do you would suggest set tunables, which are readonly or have no
> sysctl(8) equivalent after boot-time? AFAIK loader can't set tunable
> if module is not loaded at boot-time.

    Not true. Kernel tunables are really not that different (in
concept) from kernel-level environment variables. Certainly, they
would have less value if one's loading modules at boot (depending when
things are done -- i.e. how closely the sysctl pseudo service is run
to the proposed kld pseudo service), but sysctls can't be set until
the module (or respective OID leaf) has been created by the kernel
(somehow, i.e. via driver initialization, etc).
Thanks,
-Garrett