I do not understand kernel modules

[Jorn Argelo]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 13:38:54 +0100, Ramiro Aceves wrote
> Hello friends.
> 
> I am a FreeBSD newbie, I am going to ask you a question that I have not
> been able to solve reading the manual. I am using 5.3 release. I have
> compiled a custom kernel in my old pentium 75 MHz machine to include 
> the driver for my sound card. I added the following lines to the kernel
> config file
> 
> device sound
> device "snd_es137x"
> 
> and compiled the kernel perfectly. (long time.... ;-)  )
> 
> But there is something that I do not understand well. When I look at 
> the contents of /boot/kernel/ directory, I found that there are 
> kernel sound modules *.ko for every sound card the kernel supports. 
> Should not there be my sound card module alone? Does It mean that 
> you have to compile all the stuff, even if you are going to use only 
> one kind of sound card? Am I missing something?

Your sound card has been build into the kernel itself (which is /boot/kernel/
kernel AFAIK). The *.ko are kernel modules, which you can load using the 
kldload command. So in case you get a new sound card, find out what driver it 
supports and you can use kldload <yourdriver>.ko to get support for your sound 
card without recompiling your kernel.

Cheers,

Jorn