CIS 3355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Superuser, Direct Memory Access, Metar

• School: University of Houston
• Department: Computer Information Systems
• Course: CIS 3355
• Professor: Miertschin Susan

Document Summary

A device driver is a small piece of software that interacts with a speci c hardware device. Adding a new hardware device requires the kernel to be recompiled: a device driver module can be inserted into a running kernel or removed at any time without a ecting the system operation. To view device modules already installed in a linux system: lsmod. The module column shows the name of the module, and the size column shows its size. The used by column shows the number of other modules or processes that use the module and what their names are. The lsmod command displays only device driver modules, not drivers compiled into the kernel as well. Using insmod: the insmod command inserts a single device module le into the kernel, you must copy the device module le into your linux system to run it. There are two ways to remove a module from the kernel: The modprobe command includes many command options.