Appendix A. General Parameters and
Modules
This appendix is provided to illustrate some of the possible parameters available for common
hardware device drivers, which
under Red Hat Enterprise Linux are called kernel modules. In most cases, the default parameters do
work. However, there may be times when extra module parameters are
necessary for a device to function properly or to override the
module's default parameters for the device.
During installation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses a limited
subset of device drivers to create a stable installation
environment. Although the installation program supports
installation on many different types of hardware, some drivers
(including those for SCSI adapters and network adapters) are not
included in the installation kernel. Rather, they must be loaded as
modules by the user at boot time. For information about extra
kernel modules during the installation process, refer to the
section concerning alternative boot methods in the chapter titled
Steps to Get You Started in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Installation Guide.
Once installation is completed, support exists for a large
number of devices through kernel modules.
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Important |
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Red Hat provides a large number of unsupported device drivers in
a group of packages called kernel-unsupported-<kernel-version>, kernel-smp-unsupported-<kernel-version>, and kernel-hugemem-unsupported-<kernel-version>. Replace
<kernel-version> with the
version of the kernel installed on the system. These packages are
not installed by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation program,
and the modules provided are not supported by Red Hat, Inc.
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In some situations, it may be necessary to supply parameters to
a module as it is loaded for it to function properly.
For instance, to enable full duplex at 100Mbps connection speed
for an Intel Ether Express/100 card, load the e100 driver with the e100_speed_duplex=4 option.
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Caution |
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When a parameter has commas, be sure not
to put a space after a comma.
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Tip |
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The modinfo command is also useful for
listing various information about a kernel module, such as version,
dependencies, paramater options, and aliases.
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