LKM – locating LKM files on the system
Posted in How To's by Shafkat Shahzad, M.Sc - Senior Technical Content Manager on December 20th, 2009 Welcolme to the tutorial guide. The guide will provide a user with guidance and instructions on how to locate the LKM files on the system.
As the LKM world is flexible enough which means that the files that are required to loaded can live anywhere on the system. There is also a convention that most systems follow: The LKM .o files are in the directory /lib/modules, divided into subdirectories. Please note that there is one subdirectory for each version of the kernel, since LKMs are specific to a kernel. Each subdirectory contains a complete set of LKMs.
The subdirectory name is the value that a user can get from the uname –release command.
When you build Linux, a standard make modules and make modules_install should install all the LKMs that are part of Linux in the proper release subdirectory.
If you build a lot of kernels then you can keep the LKMs together with the base kernel and other kernel-related files in a subdirectory of /boot. The only drawback of this is that a user cannot have /boot reside on a tiny disk partition. In some systems, /boot is on a special tiny boot partition and contains only enough files to get the system up to the point that it can mount other filesystems.
If you followed the guide then you would have learnt about locating the LKMs.
