Before venturing into kernel configuration, it would be wise to get an inventory of the machine's hardware. In cases where FreeBSD is not the primary operating system, the inventory list can be created by viewing the current operating system configuration. For example, Microsoft®'s Device Manager contains information about installed devices.
Some versions of Microsoft® Windows® have a System icon which will display a screen where Device Manager may be accessed.
If another operating system does not exist on the machine, the administrator must find this information out manually. One method is using dmesg(8) and man(1). Most device drivers on FreeBSD have a manual page, listing supported hardware. During the boot probe, found hardware will be listed. For example, the following lines indicate that the psm(4) driver found a mouse:
This driver will need to be included in the custom kernel configuration file or loaded using loader.conf(5).
On occasion, the data from dmesg
will
only show system messages instead of the boot probe output. In
these situations, the output may be obtained by reading
/var/run/dmesg.boot
.
Another method for finding hardware is to use pciconf(8) which provides more verbose output. For example:
This output, obtained by using
pciconf
, shows that the
-lv
ath
driver located a wireless Ethernet
device. Type man
to read
ath(4).ath
The -k
flag, when passed to man(1)
can be used to provide useful information. For example, to
display a list of manual pages which contain the specified
word:
#
man -k Atheros
Armed with a hardware inventory list, the process of building a custom kernel should appear less daunting.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.