nvidia module without nvidia card

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 10:53:49AM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 09:07, Christoph Pleger
> <Christoph.Pleger at cs.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
> > can anybody tell me why the nvidia kernel module is loaded / tried to be
> > loaded even when the computer has no nvidia card and the nvidia module
> > is not listed in /etc/modules or /etc/modules-load.d/?
> 
> You might add one. This way, it will work.
> 
> This is how distros work. It's how hardware autodetection works. Try
> the driver; does it work? Yay. No? Move to the next one.

Well, sort of.  For a lot of devices it doesn't work that way at all.

Instead, kernel drivers declare the device IDs that they support, and
the kernel build system compiles all those declarations into a database
that userspace tools can read; for example, look at "modinfo nouveau |
grep ^alias:".  The kernel can then request a module for a particular
device it's detected, and userspace will look that up and load it if it
exists.  It generally *isn't* necessary to go through trying all drivers
to see if they work, which would be very much slower and not
hotplug-friendly.

It's possible that this isn't hooked up quite the same way for nvidia; I
don't know.  But it's not a general rule of how hardware autodetection
works.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]