Linux Device Drivers Development

modprobe and insmod

During development, you usually use insmod  to load a module and it should be given the path of the module to load:

insmod /path/to/mydrv.ko 

It is low-level form of module loading, that forms the base of other module loading methods, and is the one we will use in this book. On the other hand, there is modprobe, mostly used by sysadmins or in a production system. modprobe is a clever command that parses the modules.dep file in order to load dependencies first, prior to loading the given module. It automatically handles module dependencies, as a package manager does:

modprobe mydrv  

Whether you can use modprobe or not depends on depmod being aware of module installation.