[plug] internal vs external modules kernel support

[Craig Ringer]

> If support for a device is integrated into the kernel or module support can be
> loaded, how do you know which one is running and how do you force one or the
> other to load? 

Usually, you either build both as modules and only load one, or there 
will be some mechanism to tell the internal one not to activate. For 
example, there are two drivers for the Intel EtherExpress Pro/100 at the 
moment: e100 and eepro100. Typically if you wanted to try both you'd 
build both as modules and load only one.

On the other hand, there are things like ACPI and APM where one (ACPI) 
cannot be built as modules. In this case, I seem to remember you pass an 
argument on the kernel command line to disable ACPI, making it possible 
to load the APM modules.

There are two USB UHCI drivers, uhci and usb-uhci. These follow the 
eepro/100 style.

The easy way may be to simply disable the built-in PCMCIA in your 
kernel, but I don't know the details of the external PCMCIA support so 
I'm not sure about this specific case.

Craig Ringer


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