I have an embedded system that uses the gpio-led driver and the "heartbeat" trigger to set up a "heartbeat" LED. This gets enabled early in the boot.

This works fine until rc starts loading the compat-wireless modules and other modules related to the wireless adapter. There are 7 modules in total required for the wireless adapter. These loadable modules appear to hog all the resources so the heartbeat LED stalls, stutters, or otherwise runs really slowly while these modules are being loaded.

Once the modules have loaded, everything is fine and the heartbeat LED runs as expected, even under heavy network use.

The question is: Can this be avoided? The LED is supposed to be a boot status indicator, and having it stop and stutter while these modules are loading is not the desired effect. And how/why does loading these particular modules screw with the operation of the kernel timers??? Shouldn't the kernel be able to "keep time" while loading modules? (I load a couple other modules after the wireless modules that do not affect the blinking of of the heartbeat LED.)

The wireless driver has problem and could access the resource that doesn't belong to it.

Some more experimenting shows that the loading of ANY module stops the heartbeat LED from flashing. Once the load completes, the LED flashes normally. So there is something "broken" with the way insmod works on this system. It's NOT an issue with the wireless modules.