Hi all,

I would like to disable USB, firewire and PCMCIA modules and load them manually only when I need them (that is almost never). Is there a config file somewhere that tells the system which modules to load or which modules should be blocked?

If there is no central place where module loading can be configure, my second choice would be to remove the modules after startup. However, I can't seem to find a way to unload the usbcore module. lsmod tells me that there are three dependencies, but it shows me the names of just two of them. The third, nameless one, seems to block unloading. It doesn't even help to remove usbcore.ko from the lib/modules/** directory. It still gets loaded according to dmesg.

Does the Linux module system have any kind of central management interface?

I'm using Ubuntu 6.1.

Any help is much appreciated.

In Ubuntu I believe you can "blacklist" module you don't want to be loaded.

I think this doc. might help -> http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Get_ri...loaded_at_boot

Thanks for you reply!

Unfortunately the blacklist thing doesn't seem to work. I blacklisted usbcore, uhci_hcd and ehci_hcd in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist but after rebooting all of them are loaded and there is nothing unusual about it in dmesg. Is there a way to find out what triggers the loading of a module?

in redhat enterprize linux, you can find the modules' dependency in modules.dep:
/lib/modules/`uname -r`/modules.dep

Thanks for your reply!

I know that file and it cost me a lot of time to sift through it as it lists all dependencies between a huge number of modules, not just the ones that are actually in use. Anyway, none of the other loaded modules apart from uhci_hcd and ehci_hcd are shown to depend on usbcore. What does it mean when lsmod says there are three dependencies but then it only shows two of them?