I believe most of anaconda's "magic" comes from probing the PCI and USB 
bus for vendor and device IDs.  If you dig into a driver (for example, 
e1000e), you will find a pcitable listing all of the IDs the driver 
supports.  If you look in /lib/modules/<kernel>/ you will find a 
modules.pcimap and modules.usbmap among other bus types.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Mark

Ken Teh wrote:
> How does a system determine the appropriate sata driver?  
> Specifically, how does anaconda figure out to write
>
> alias scsi_hostadapter ata_piix
>
> in my modprobe.conf and to bind it into my initrd image?
>
> I took apart boot.iso but didnt find anything "readable" that 
> indicated how this was determined.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ken
>


-- 
Mr. Mark V. Stodola
Digital Systems Engineer

National Electrostatics Corp.
P.O. Box 620310
Middleton, WI 53562-0310 USA
Phone: (608) 831-7600
Fax: (608) 831-9591