Book Image

Beaglebone Essentials

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

Beaglebone Essentials

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

If you are a developer with some hardware or electrical engineering experience who wants to learn how to use embedded machine-learning capabilities and get access to a GNU/Linux device driver to collect data from a peripheral or to control a device, this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

The modutils

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 (<...