Am 18.01.2012 16:06, schrieb Aleksey Bragin:
On 18.01.2012 18:14, Jakob Eriksson wrote:
On January 18, 2012 at 2:54 PM Adamgeekdundee@gmail.com wrote:
Although that would require recompiling the kernel just to install/uninstall drivers. I do understand loadable modules are supported but I'm not sure this applies to drivers. And if it does, I doubt it would apply to all drivers.
No recompile. It applies to all drivers for PCI and USB devices and huge bunch of other things. Almost everything is loadable, including all routing tricks.
It's a loadable module, yes, and it loads dynamically indeed. There is one issue though: the binary driver itself has to be recompiled with every Linux kernel update. I personally experience this when I patch the bt8x8 video capture device driver for my 8 ports capturing card, every time I manually patch source code to include my specific hardware (oh yes, it's already 5 years old, it's being sold in every hardware shop, but still it's not in the linux kernel).
P.S. Proper answer from Linux team would be "We accept patches!" :-).
Well... I DID sent in patches to get my video capture device supported and since 2.9.38 I can finally use it without manually compiling the "standalone variant" provided by the driver's maintainer ;)
Regards, Sven