nvidia module without nvidia card
Colin Watson
cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Wed Sep 5 09:24:02 UTC 2018
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]
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