Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

Henrik Storner
[email protected]
Copyright 2000 by Linux Documentation Project
Revision History
Revision v2.0
22 May 2000
conversion from HTML to DocBook SGML.

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

Table of Contents
1. About the kerneld miniHOWTO................................................................................................................1
1.1. Credits...............................................................................................................................................1
2. What is kerneld?.............................................................................................................................................2
2.1. Why do I want to use it ?..................................................................................................................2
2.2. Where can I pick up the necessary pieces ?.....................................................................................2
3. How do I set it up?..........................................................................................................................................4
3.1. Trying out kerneld.............................................................................................................................5
4. How does kerneld know what module to load?...........................................................................................7
4.1. Block devices....................................................................................................................................7
4.2. Character devices..............................................................................................................................8
4.3. Network devices................................................................................................................................8
4.4. Binary formats..................................................................................................................................8
4.5. Line disciplines (slip, cslip and ppp)................................................................................................9
4.6. Network protocol families (IPX, AppleTalk, AX.25).....................................................................9
4.7. File systems.......................................................................................................................................9
5. Devices requiring special configuration.....................................................................................................10
5.1. charmajor10 : Mice, watchdogs and randomness......................................................................10
5.2. Loading SCSI drivers: The scsi_hostadapter entry........................................................................10
5.3. When loading a module isn't enough: The postinstall entry........................................................11
Notes.........................................................................................................................................13
6. Spying on kerneld.........................................................................................................................................14
7. Special kerneld uses......................................................................................................................................15
8. Common problems and things that make you wonder..............................................................................18

1. About the kerneld miniHOWTO

This document explains how to install and use the automatic kernel module loader "kerneld". The latest
released version of this document can be found at the Linux Documentation Project

1.1. Credits
This document is based on an original HTML version 1.7 dated July 19, 1997 by Henrik Storner
<[email protected]> and was revised and translated to DocBook DTD by Gary Lawrence
Murphy <[email protected]> May 20, 2000.
The following people have contributed to this miniHOWTO at some point:
Bjorn Ekwall [email protected]
Ben Galliart [email protected]
Cedric Tefft [email protected]
Brian Miller [email protected]
James C. Tsiao [email protected]
If you find errors in this document, please send email to <[email protected]>. Your
comments, encouragement and suggestions are welcome and appreciated, and help ensure this guide remains
current and accurate.

1. About the kerneld miniHOWTO

2. What is kerneld?
The kerneld feature was introduced during the 1.3 development kernels by Bjorn Ekwall. It allows kernel
modules such as device drivers, network drivers and filesystems to be loaded automatically when they are
needed, rather than having to do it manually with modprobe or insmod.
And for the more amusing aspects, although these are not (yet ?) integrated with the standard kernel:
It can be setup to run a userprogram instead of the default screen blanker, thus letting you use any
program as a screensaver.
Similar to the screenblanker support, you can also change the standard console beep into something
completely different.
kerneld consists of two components:
Support in the Linux kernel for sending requests to a daemon requesting a module for a certain task.
A userspace daemon that can figure out what modules must be loaded to fulfill the request from the
kernel.
Both components must be working for the kerneld support to function; it is not enough that only one or the
other has been setup.

2.1. Why do I want to use it ?

There are some good reasons for using kerneld. The ones I will mention are mine, others have other reasons.
If you have to build kernels for several systems that only differ slightly different kind of network
card, for instance then you can build a single kernel and some modules, instead of having to build
individual kernels for each system.
Modules are easier for developers to test. You don't need to reboot the system to load and unload the
driver; this applies to all modules, not just kerneldloaded ones.
It cuts down on the kernel memory usage leaving more memory available for applications. Memory
used by the kernel is never swapped out, so if you have 100Kb worth of unused drivers compiled into
your kernel, they are simply wasting RAM.
Some of the things I use, the ftape floppytape driver, for instance, or iBCS, are only available as
modules, but I don't want to bother with loading and unloading them whenever I need them.
People making Linux distributions don't have to build 284 different boot images: Each user loads the
drivers he needs for just his hardware. Most modern Linux distributions will detect your hardware
and will only load those modules actually required.
Of course, there are also reasons why you may not want to use it. If you prefer to have just one kernel image
file with all of your drivers built in, you are reading the wrong document.

2.2. Where can I pick up the necessary pieces ?

The support in the Linux kernel was introduced with Linux 1.3.57. If you have an earlier kernel version, you
will need to upgrade if you want the kerneld support. The current Linux kernel sources can be found at most
2. What is kerneld?

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

Linux FTP archive sites including:
Kernel.Org Archive
Metalab Linux Archive
TSX11 at MIT
The userspace daemon is included with the modules package. These are normally available from the same
place as the kernel sources
Note: If you want to try moduleloading with the latest development kernels, you should use
the newer modutils package and not the modules. Always check the
Documentation/Changes file in the kernel sources for the minimum required version
number for your kernel image. Also see about the problems with modules and 2.1 kernels.

2. What is kerneld?

3. How do I set it up?

First get the necessary parts: A suitable kernel and the latest modules package. Then you should install the
module utilities as per the instructions included in the package. Pretty simple: Just unpack the sources and run
make install. This compiles and installs the following programs in /sbin: genksysm, insmod, lsmod,
modprobe, depmod and kerneld. I recommend you add some lines to your startupscripts to do some
necessary setup whenever you boot Linux. Add the following lines to your /etc/rc.d/rc.S file (if you
are running Slackware), or to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit if you are running SysVinit, i.e. Debian, Corel,
RedHat, Mandrake or Caldera:
# Start kerneld this should happen very early in the
# boot process, certainly BEFORE you run fsck on filesystems
# that might need to have disk drivers autoloaded
if [ x /sbin/kerneld ]
then
/sbin/kerneld
fi
# Your standard fsck commands go here
# And you mount command to mount the root fs readwrite
# Update kernelmodule dependencies file
# Your rootfs MUST be mounted readwrite by now
if [ x /sbin/depmod ]
then
/sbin/depmod a
fi

These commands may already be installed in your SysV init scripts. The first part starts kerneld itself. The
second calls depmod a at startup to build a list of all available modules and analyzes their
interdependencies. The depmod map then tells kerneld if one module needs to have another loaded before it
will itself load.
Note: Recent versions of kerneld have an option to link with the GNU gdbm library,
libgdbm. If you enable this when building the module utilities, kerneld will not start if
libgdbm is not available which may well be the case if you have /usr on a separate
partition and start kerneld before /usr is mounted. The recommended solution is to move
/usr/lib/libgdbm to /lib, or to link kerneld statically.
Next, unpack the kernel sources, configure and build a kernel to your liking. If you have never done this
before, you should definitely read the README file at the top level of the Linux sources. When you run
make xconfig to configure the kernel, you should pay attention to some questions that appear early on:
Enable loadable module support (CONFIG_MODULES) [Y/n/?] Y

You need to select the loadable module support, or there will be no modules for kerneld to load! Just say Yes.
Kernel daemon support (CONFIG_KERNELD) [Y/n/?] Y

This, of course, is also necessary. Then, a lot of the things in the kernel can be built as modules you will see
questions like
Normal floppy disk support (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_FD) [M/n/y/?]

3. How do I set it up?

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

where you can answer with an M for "Module". Generally, only the drivers necessary for you to boot up your
system should be built into the kernel; the rest can be built as modules.
Essential drivers
Essential drivers required to boot your system must be compiled into the core kernel and cannot be loaded as
modules. Typically this will include the harddisk driver and the driver for the root filesystem. If you have a
dualboot machine and rely on files found in the foreign partition, you must also compile support for that
filesystem into the core kernel.
When you have gone through the make config, compile and install the new kernel and the modules with
make dep clean bzlilo modules modules_install.
Phew.
Compiling a Kernel Image: The make zImage command will stop short of installing a
kernel and will leave the new kernel image in the file arch/i386/boot/zImage. To use
this image, you will need to copy it to where you keep your bootimage and install it
manually with LILO.
For more information about configuring, building and installing your own kernel, check out
the KernelHOWTO posted regularly to comp.os.linux.answers, and available from
the Linux Documentation Project and its mirrors.

3.1. Trying out kerneld

Now reboot with the new kernel. When the system comes back up, you can run ps ax, and you should see a
line for kerneld:
PID TTY STAT
59 ? S

TIME COMMAND
0:01 /sbin/kerneld

One of the nice things with kerneld is that once you have the kernel and the daemon installed, very little setup
is needed. For a start, try using one of the drivers that you built as a module; it is more likely than not that it
will work without further configuration. If I build the floppy driver as a module, I could put a DOS floppy in
the drive and type
osiris:~ $ mdir a:
Volume in drive A has no label
Volume Serial Number is 2E2B1102
Directory for A:/
binuti~1 gz
1942 02141996 11:35a binutils2.6.0.62.6.0.7.diff.gz
libc5~1 gz
24747 02141996 11:35a libc5.3.45.3.5.diff.gz
2 file(s)
26689 bytes

The floppy driver works! It gets loaded automatically by kerneld when I try to use the floppy disk.
To see that the floppy module is indeed loaded, you can run /sbin/lsmod to list all currently loaded modules:

3.1. Trying out kerneld

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

osiris:~ $ /sbin/lsmod
Module:
#pages:
floppy
11

Used by:
0 (autoclean)

The "(autoclean)" means that the module will automatically be removed by kerneld when it has not been used
for more than one minute. So the 11 pages of memory (= 44kB, one page is 4 kB) will only be used while I
access the floppy drive if I don't use the floppy for more than a minute, they are freed. Quite nice, if you are
short of memory for your applications!

3.1. Trying out kerneld

4. How does kerneld know what module to load?

Although kerneld comes with builtin knowledge about the most common types of modules, there are
situations where kerneld will not know how to handle a request from the kernel. This is the case with things
like CDROM drivers or network drivers, where there are more than one possible module that can be loaded.
The requests that the kerneld daemon gets from the kernel is for one of the following items:
a blockdevice driver
a characterdevice driver
a binary format
a tty line discipline
a filesystem
a network device
a network service (e.g. rarp)
a network protocol (e.g. IPX)
The kerneld determines what module should be loaded by scanning the configuration file
/etc/conf.modules[1]. There are two kinds of entries in this file: Paths where the modulefiles are
located, and aliases assigning the module to be loaded for a given service. If you don't have this file already,
you could create it by running
/sbin/modprobe c | grep v '^path' /etc/conf.modules

If you want to add yet another path directive to the default paths, you must include all the default paths as
well, since a path directive in /etc/conf.modules will replaceall the ones that modprobe knows by
default!
Normally you don't want to add any paths by your own, since the builtin set should take care of all normal
setups (and then some...), I promise!
On the other hand, if you just want to add an alias or an option directive, your new entries in
/etc/conf.modules will be added to the ones that modprobe already knows. If you should redefine an
alias or an option, your new entries in /etc/conf.modules will override the builtin ones.

4.1. Block devices

If you run /sbin/modprobe c, you will get a listing of the modules that kerneld knows about, and what
requests they correspond to. For instance, the request that ends up loading the floppy driver is for the
blockdevice that has major number 2:
osiris:~ $ /sbin/modprobe c | grep floppy
alias blockmajor2 floppy

Why blockmajor2 ? Because the floppy devices /dev/fd* use major device 2 and are block devices:
osiris:~ $ ls l /dev/fd0 /dev/fd1
brwrwrw
1 root
root
2,
brwrr
1 root
root
2,

0 Mar
1 Mar

4. How does kerneld know what module to load?

3
3

1995 /dev/fd0
1995 /dev/fd1

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

4.2. Character devices

Character devices are dealt with in a similar way. E.g. the ftape floppy tape driver sits on majordevice 27:
osiris:~ $ ls lL /dev/ftape
crwrw
1 root
disk

27,

0 Jul 18

1994 /dev/ftape

However, kerneld does not by default know about the ftape driver it is not listed in the output from
/sbin/modprobe c. So to setup kerneld to load the ftape driver, I must add a line to the kerneld
configuration file, /etc/conf.modules:
alias charmajor27 ftape

4.3. Network devices

You can also use the device name instead of the charmajorxxx or blockmajoryyy setup. This is
especially useful for network drivers. For example, a driver for an ne2000 netcard acting as eth0 would be
loaded with
alias eth0 ne

If you need to pass some options to the driver, for example to tell the module about what IRQ the netcard is
using, you must add an "options" line:
options ne irq=5

This will cause kerneld to load the NE2000 driver with the command
/sbin/modprobe ne irq=5

Of course, the actual options available are specific to the module you are loading.

4.4. Binary formats

Binary formats are handled in a similar way. Whenever you try to run a program that the kernel does not
know how to load, kerneld gets a request for binfmtxxx, where xxx is a number determined from the
first few bytes of the executable. So, the kerneld configuration to support loading the binfmt_aout module for
ZMAGIC (a.out) executables is
alias binfmt267 binfmt_aout

Since the magic number for ZMAGIC files is 267, if you check /etc/magic, you will see the number
0413; keep in mind that /etc/magic uses octal numbers where kerneld uses decimal, and octal 413 =
decimal 267. There are actually three slightly different variants of a.out executables (NMAGIC, QMAGIC
and ZMAGIC), so for full support of the binfmt_aout module we need
4.2. Character devices

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

alias binfmt264 binfmt_aout
alias binfmt267 binfmt_aout
alias binfmt204 binfmt_aout

# pure executable (NMAGIC)

# demandpaged executable (ZMAGIC)
# demandpaged executable (QMAGIC)

a.out, Java and iBCS binary formats are recognized automatically by kerneld, without any configuration.

4.5. Line disciplines (slip, cslip and ppp)

Line disciplines are requested with ttyldiscx, with x being usually 1 (for SLIP) or 3 (for PPP). Both
of these are known by kerneld automatically.
Speaking of ppp, if you want kerneld to load the bsd_comp data compression module for ppp, then you must
add the following two lines to your /etc/conf.modules:
alias ttyldisc3 bsd_comp
alias ppp0 bsd_comp

4.6. Network protocol families (IPX, AppleTalk, AX.25)

Some network protocols can be loaded as modules as well. The kernel asks kerneld for a protocol family (e.g.
IPX) with a request for netpfX where X is a number indicating what family is wanted. E.g.
netpf3 is AX.25, netpf4 is IPX and netpf5 is AppleTalk; These numbers are determined by
the AF_AX25, AF_IPX etc. definitions in the linux source file include/linux/socket.h. So to
autoload the IPX module, you would need an entry like this in /etc/conf.modules:
alias netpf4 ipx

See Common Problems for information about how you can avoid some annoying boottime messages related
to undefined protocol families.

4.7. File systems

kerneld requests for filesystems are simply the name of the filesystem type. A common use of this would be
to load the isofs module for CDROM filesystems, i.e. filesystems of type iso9660:
alias iso9660 isofs

4.5. Line disciplines (slip, cslip and ppp)

5. Devices requiring special configuration

Some devices require a bit of extra configuration beyond the normal aliasing of a device to a module.
Character devices on major number 10: The miscellaneous devices
SCSI devices
Devices that require special initialization

5.1. charmajor10 : Mice, watchdogs and randomness

Hardware devices are usually identified through their major device numbers, e.g. ftape is charmajor27.
However, if you look through the entries in /dev for char major 10, you will see that this is a bunch of very
different devices, including
Mice of various sorts (bus mice, PS/2 mice)
Watchdog devices
The kernel random device
APM (Advanced Power Management) interface
These devices are controlled by several different modules, not a single one, and therefore the kerneld
configuration for these misc. devices use the major number and the minor number:
alias charmajor101 psaux
alias charmajor10130 wdt

# For PS/2 mouse

# For WDT watchdog

You need a kernel version 1.3.82 or later to use this; earlier versions do not pass the minor number to kerneld,
making it impossible for kerneld to figure out which of the misc. device modules to load.

5.2. Loading SCSI drivers: The scsi_hostadapter entry

Drivers for SCSI devices consist of a driver for the SCSI host adapter (e.g. an Adaptec 1542), and a driver for
the type of SCSI device you use, e.g. a hard disk, a CDROM or a tapedrive. All of these can be loaded as
modules. However, when you want to access e.g. the CDROM drive that is connected to the Adaptec card,
the kernel and kerneld only knows that it needs to load the sr_mod module in order to support SCSI
CDROM's; it does not know what SCSI controller the CDROM is connected to, and hence does not know
what module to load to support the SCSI controller.
To resolve this, you can add an entry for the SCSI driver module to your /etc/conf.modules that tells
kerneld which of the many possible SCSI controller modules it should load:
alias scd0 sr_mod
alias scsi_hostadapter aha1542

# sr_mod for SCSI CDROM's ...

# ... need the Adaptec driver

This only works with kernel version 1.3.82 or later.

This works if you have only one SCSI controller. If you have more than one, things become a little more
difficult.
5. Devices requiring special configuration

10

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

In general, you cannot have kerneld load a driver for a SCSI host adapter, if a driver for another host adapter
is already installed. You must either build both drivers into your kernel (not as modules), or load the modules
manually.
Tip: There is a way that you can have kerneld load multiple SCSI drivers. James Tsiao came
up with this idea:

You can easily have kerneld load the second scsi driver by setting up the dependency in your
modules.dep by hand. You just need an entry like:
/lib/modules/2.0.30/scsi/st.o: /lib/modules/2.0.30/scsi/aha1542.o

To have kerneld load the aha1542.o before it loads st.o. My machine at home is set up
almost exactly like the setup above, and it works fine for all my secondary scsi devices,
including tape, cdrom, and generic scsi devices. The drawback is that depmod a can't
autodetect these dependencies, so the user needs to add them by hand, and not run depmod
a on boot up. But once it is set up, kerneld will autoload the aha1542.o just fine.
You should be aware, that this technique only works if you have different kinds of SCSI devices on the two
controllers, for example, hard disks on one controller, and cdrom drives, tapes or generic SCSI devices on
another.

5.3. When loading a module isn't enough: The

postinstall entry
Sometimes, just loading the module is not enough to get things working. For instance, if you have your sound
card compiled as a module, it is often convenient to set a certain volume level. Only problem is, the setting
vanishes the next time the module is loaded. Here is a neat trick from Ben Galliart
(<[email protected]>):

The final solution required installing the setmix package and then adding the following line
to my /etc/conf.modules:
postinstall sound /usr/local/bin/setmix f /etc/volume.conf

What this does is that after the sound module is loaded, kerneld runs the command indicated by the
postinstall sound entry. So the sound module gets configured with the command
/usr/local/bin/setmix f /etc/volume.conf.
This may be useful for other modules as well, for example the lp module can be configured with the
tunelp program by adding
postinstall lp tunelp options

For kerneld to recognize these options, you will need a version of kerneld that is 1.3.69f or later.
Note: An earlier version of this miniHOWTO mentioned a preremove option, that might
5.3. When loading a module isn't enough: The postinstall entry

11

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

be used to run a command just before kerneld removed a module. However, this has never
worked and its use is therefore discouraged most likely, this option will disappear in a
future kerneld release. The whole issue of module settings is undergoing some change at the
moment, and may look different on your system by the time you read this.

5.3. When loading a module isn't enough: The postinstall entry

12

6. Spying on kerneld
If you have tried everything, and just cannot figure out what the kernel is asking kerneld to do, there is a way
of seeing the requests that kerneld receives, and hence to figure out what should go into
/etc/conf.modules: The kdstat utility.
This nifty little program comes with the modulespackage, but it is not compiled or installed by default. To
build it, go to the directory where you have the kerneld sources and type make kdstat. Then, to make kerneld
display information about what it is doing, run kdstat debug and kerneld will start spewing messages on the
console about what it is doing. If you then try and run the command that you want to use, you will see the
kerneld requests; these can be put into /etc/conf.modules and aliased to the module needed to get the
job done.
To turn off the debugging, run /sbin/kdstat nodebug.

6. Spying on kerneld

13

7. Special kerneld uses

I knew you would ask about how to setup the screensaver module!
The kerneld/GOODIES directory in modules package has a couple of kernel patches for screensaver and
consolebeep support in kerneld; these are not yet part of the official kernel, so you will need to install the
kernelpatches and rebuild the kernel.
To install a patch, you use the patch command:
cd /usr/src/linux
patch s p1 /usr/src/modules*/kerneld/GOODIES/blanker_patch

Then rebuild and install the new kernel.

When the screensaver triggers, kerneld will run the command /sbin/screenblanker; this file may be
anything you like, for example, a shell script that runs your favorite screensaver.
When the kernel wants to unblank the screen, it sends a SIGQUIT signal to the process running
/sbin/screenblanker. Your shell script or screensaver should trap this, and terminate. Remember to
restore the screen to the original text mode!

7. Special kerneld uses

14

8. Common problems and things that make you

wonder
8.1. Why do I get Cannot locate module for netpfX messages when I run /sbin/ifconfig?
8.2. After starting kerneld, my system slows to a crawl when I activate my pppconnection
8.3. kerneld does not load my SCSI driver!
8.4. modprobe complains about gcc2_compiled being undefined
8.5. My sound driver keeps forgetting its settings for volume etc
8.6. DOSEMU needs some modules; how can I get kerneld to load those ?
8.7. Why do I get Ouch, kerneld timed out, message failed messages ?
8.8. Mount doesn't wait for kerneld to load the filesystem module
8.9. kerneld fails to load the ncpfs module
8.10. kerneld fails to load the smbfs module
8.11. I built everything as modules, and now my system cannot boot or kerneld fails to load the root
filesystem module!
8.12. kerneld will not load at boot time; it complains about libgdbm
8.13. I get Cannot load module xxx but I just reconfigured my kernel without xxx support!
8.14. I rebuilt my kernel and modules, and still get messages about unresolved symbols when booting
8.15. I installed Linux 2.1/2.3 and now I cannot load any modules!
8.16. What about dialondemand networking?
8.1. Why do I get Cannot locate module for netpfX messages when I run /sbin/ifconfig?
Around kernel version 1.3.80, the networking code was changed to allow loading protocol families (e.g. IPX,
AX.25 and AppleTalk) as modules. This caused the addition of a new kerneld request: netpfX, where
X is a number identifying the protocol (see /usr/src/linux/include/linux/socket.h for the
meaning of the various numbers). Unfortunately, ifconfig accidentally triggers these messages, so a lot of
people get a couple of messages logged when the system boots and it runs ifconfig to setup the loopback
device. The messages are harmless, and you can disable them by adding the lines
alias netpf3 off
alias netpf4 off
alias netpf5 off

# Forget AX.25
# Forget IPX
# Forget AppleTalk

to /etc/conf.modules. Of course, if you do use IPX as a module, you should not add a line to disable
IPX.
8.2. After starting kerneld, my system slows to a crawl when I activate my pppconnection
There have been a couple of reports of this. It seems to be an unfortunate interaction between kerneld and the
tkPPP script that is used on some systems to setup and monitor the PPP connection. The script apparently
runs loops while running ifconfig. This triggers kerneld, to look for the netpfX modules (see above),
keeping the system load high and possibly pouring lots of Cannot locate module for netpfX messages
into the system log. There is no known workaround, other than not use tkPPP, or change it to use some other
way of monitoring the connection.
8.3. kerneld does not load my SCSI driver!
Add an entry for the SCSI hostadapter to your /etc/conf.modules. See the description of the
scsi_hostadapter entry above.
8. Common problems and things that make you wonder

15

Linux kerneld miniHOWTO

8.4. modprobe complains about gcc2_compiled being undefined
This is a bug in the module utilities, that show up only with binutils 2.6.0.9 and later, and it is also
documented in the release note for the binutils. So read that, or fetch an upgrade to the moduleutilities that
fix this bug.
8.5. My sound driver keeps forgetting its settings for volume etc
The settings for a module are stored inside the module itself when it is loaded. So when kerneld autounloads
a module, any settings you have made are forgotten, and the next time the module loads it reverts to the
default settings.
You can tell kerneld to configure a module by running a program after the module has been autoloaded. See
Pre/Post Install on the postinstall entry.
8.6. DOSEMU needs some modules; how can I get kerneld to load those ?
You cannot. None of the dosemu versions, official or development versions, support loading the dosemu
modules through kerneld. However, if you are running kernel 2.0.26 or later, you do not need the special
dosemu modules any longer; just upgrade dosemu to 0.66.1 or higher.
8.7. Why do I get Ouch, kerneld timed out, message failed messages ?
When the kernel sends a request off to to kerneld, it expects to receive an acknowledgment back within one
second. If kerneld does not send this acknowledgment, this message is logged. The request is retransmitted,
and should get through eventually.
This usually happens on systems with a very high load. Since kerneld is a usermode process, it is scheduled
just like any other process on the system. At times of high load, it may not get to run in time to send back the
acknowledgment before the kernel times out.
If this happens even when the load is light, try restarting kerneld. Kill the kerneld process, and start it again
with the command /usr/sbin/kerneld. If the problem persists, you should mail a bug report to
<[email protected]>, but please make sure that your versions of the kernel, kerneld
and the module utilities are uptodate before posting about the problem. Check the requirements in
linux/Documentation/Changes
8.8. Mount doesn't wait for kerneld to load the filesystem module
There has been a number of reports that the mount(8) command does not wait for kerneld to load the
filesystem module. lsmod does show that kerneld loads the module, and if you repeat the mount command
immediately it will succeed. This appears to be a bug in the moduleutilities version 1.3.69f that affects some
Debian users. It can be fixed by getting a later version of the moduleutilities.
8.9. kerneld fails to load the ncpfs module
You need to compile the ncpfs utilities with DHAVE_KERNELD. See the ncpfs Makefile.
8.10. kerneld fails to load the smbfs module
You are using an older version of the smbmount utilities. Get the latest version (0.10 or later) from the
8. Common problems and things that make you wonder

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SMBFS archive one TSX11
8.11. I built everything as modules, and now my system cannot boot or kerneld fails to load the root
filesystem module!
You cannot modularize everything: The kernel must have enough drivers built in for it to be able to mount
your root filesystem, and run the necessary programs to start kerneld[2]. You cannot modularize
the driver for the hard disk where your root filesystem lives
the root filesystem driver itself
the binary format loader for init, kerneld and other programs
8.12. kerneld will not load at boot time; it complains about libgdbm
Newer versions of kerneld need the GNU dbm library, libgdbm.so, to run. Most installations have this file
in /usr/lib, but you are probably starting kerneld before the /usr filesystem is mounted. One symptom
of this is that kerneld will not start during bootup (from your rcscripts), but runs fine if you start it by hand
after that system is up. The solution is to either move the kerneld startup to after your /usr is mounted, or
move the gdbm library to your root filesystem, e.g. to /lib.
8.13. I get Cannot load module xxx but I just reconfigured my kernel without xxx support!
The Slackware installation (possibly others) builds a default /etc/rc.d/rc.modules which does an
explicit modprobe on a variety of modules. Exactly which modules get modprobed depends on the original
kernel's configuration. You have probably reconfigured your kernel to exclude one or more of the modules
that is getting modprobed in rc.modules, thus, the error message(s). Update your rc.modules by commenting
out any modules you no longer use, or remove the rc.modules entirely and let kerneld load the modules
when they are needed.
8.14. I rebuilt my kernel and modules, and still get messages about unresolved symbols when booting
You probably reconfigured/rebuilt your kernel and excluded some modules. You've got some old modules
that you no longer use hanging around in the /lib/modules directory. The easiest fix is to delete your
/lib/modules/x.y.z directory and do a make modules_install from the kernel source directory again.
Note that this problem only occurs when reconfiguring your kernel without changing versions. If you see this
error when moving to a newer kernel version you've got some other problem.
8.15. I installed Linux 2.1/2.3 and now I cannot load any modules!
Odd numbered Linux are development kernels. As such, it should be expected that things break from time to
time. One of the things that has changed significantly is the way modules are handled, and where the kernel
and modules are loaded into memory.
In brief, if you want to use modules with a development kernel, you must
read the Documentation/Changes file and see what packages need upgrading on your system
use the latest modutils package, available from AlphaBits on Red Hat or the mirror site at TSX11
I recommend using at least kernel 2.1.29, if you want to use modules with a 2.1 kernel.
8.16. What about dialondemand networking?
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kerneld originally had some support for establishing dialup network connections on demand; trying to send
packets to a network without being connected would cause kerneld to run the
/sbin/request_route script to setup a PPP or SLIP connection.
This turned out to be a bad idea. Alan Cox of Linux networking fame wrote on the linuxkernel mailing list

The requestroute stuff is obsolete, broken and not required [...] Its also removed from 2.1.x
trees.
Instead of using the requestroute script and kerneld, I highly recommend Eric Schenk's diald package to
manage your demand dialing.

Notes
[1]
Some distributions call this file modules.conf
[2]
Actually, this is not true. Late 1.3.x and all 2.x kernels support the use of an initial ramdisk that is
loaded by LILO or LOADLIN; it is possible to load modules from this disk very early in the boot
process. How to do it is described in the linux/Documentation/initrd.txt file that comes
with the kernel sourcefiles.

Notes

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