Strange ATI problem

[Boorish Id]

Ever since i set up Gentoo i have been strugling to get my Radeon 7200 to work. Well i got it working today WOOHOO! im so happy, but i was wondering if someone could tell me why it wasn't working, i still dont understand why. Ok so i was trying to compile agpgart, ati-chipset, and via-chipset support into kernel 2.6.10, for the life of me i couldnt get the card to work Xorg was always saying agpgart initilazation failed and glxinfo retunred null to me. So today i recompiled my kernel with ATI support as modular instead of built in threw all the modules i needed for it into modules.autoload.d and everything appears to be working beautifuly! But why is my box insiting on the card being loaded as modules instead of in the kernel?

[olivertheredx]

It could be that the ati-drivers needed something that wasn't built into the kernel. Compiling as a module allowed the dependant modules or systems to be loaded before the ati driver was loaded.

As a rule of thumb I always compile as a module unless I need the driver to at boot time (e.g. my IDE chipset is compiled into the kernel not as a module).

You can compile more-or-less everything as a module and load some of them as part of the boot process, but that's more trouble that it's worth.

[MasterX]