As we already saw in the Device drivers section of Chapter 3, Compiling versus Cross-compiling, a loadable kernel module can act as a device driver, and the system can load it at runtime when its functionalities are required. The basic command to load a module into the kernel is insmod; however, there exists another command to load a module (and its dependencies) and its name is modprobe (see the following section for more information).
Actually, there exists a group of commands to manage the kernel modules; these commands are called the modutils. On the Debian system, running on our BeagleBone Black, the modutils are stored in the package named kmod:
root@BeagleBone:~# apt-cache show kmod Package: kmod Version: 9-3 Installed-Size: 172 Maintainer: Marco d'Itri <[email protected]> Architecture: armhf Replaces: module-init-tools (<< 4) Depends: libc6 (>= 2.13-28), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.4.0), libkmod2 (>= 6~), lsb-base (>= 3.0-6) Breaks: module-init-tools (<< 4...