I do not understand kernel modules

[Ramiro Aceves]

Jorn Argelo wrote:
> 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.



Yes, I understand now. The problem is that my old pentium machine takes 
very long time to compile all the modules even if I am not going to use 
them. I would like to compile only the modules I use, to reduce 
compiling time. Is that possible?



Thanks





> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jorn
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