[Gllug] What does [permanent] mean in an lsmod listing?

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 03:02:56PM +0000, John Winters wrote:
[...]
> How then I wonder does one decide which of the IDE modules is actually
> doing the work?  I see no point in loading all the others, but hotplug
> seems to sling them in regardless.

I guess you're running on a _really_ tight system where even 11 pages
of RAM are important then :-)

> ide_disk               16640  4
> ide_generic             1408  0 [permanent]
> via82cxxx              12572  0 [permanent]

My reading of the source (eg. here:
http://lxr.linux.no/source/drivers/ide/) is that ide_disk is required
to support your disk devices, ide_generic seems to be required because
it's the default fallback for unrecognised IDE devices (but in your
case is probably not used) and the via82cxxx driver is there because
that's the chipset on your motherboard.  The via82cxxx driver does
some magic tweaking to the VIA chipset when it's loaded, but otherwise
won't be used unless you access its /proc entry to view and tweak
VIA-specific settings.  But it can hardly do any harm to leave it
there.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
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