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Drivers and modules

Drivers and modules - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Tips

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Drivers and modules

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- The Linux kernel comes with support for a huge number of hardware devices built in, this allows the kernel to recognize and use a wide array of common system hardware right out of the box without any special configuration, but it's both impractical and basically impossible to try to include support for every possible kind of hardware. Some hardware is uncommon. Some relies on proprietary software, and new hardware is being released all the time. So if we need to use hardware that isn't supported by the kernel, we have two choices. We can write supporting software for the hardware and recompile the kernel to include it, or we can use loadable kernel modules, which allow a lot of flexibility when it comes to supporting hardware that isn't recognized by the kernel. In this episode, I want to show you how loadable kernel modules, what many other operating systems refer to as drivers can be added to the system to support…

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