Speed up by removing modules

Question

I'm currently in the process of deciding what modules to remove in order to speed up the boot process (significantly??? this might not even be worth it if boot times aren't affected that much).
However, there doesn't seem to be a good way to find out what each module does other than removing it and seeing what breaks. A few of them can be google seached, but for many others I don't know if it has broken something or not as I don't know what should be tested. Any advice on a better way to see which modules are unneeded would be appreciated.
FYI: So far i've removed ppp_generic and slhc as I don't use ISDN or dial-up. It seems eepro100 doesn't seem to be necessary for the ethernet connection to work. I've removed ieee1394 ohci1394 firewire_ohci firewire_core as my firewire slot isn't working anyway. Also removed battery as i'm using a desktop computer.
Last edited by Jamie (2008-01-27 14:18:39)

Answer 1

You could try the modinfo command, as it gives a little hint in it's description output, and lsmod to see if a module you want to remove is required by some other module.
But generally, the best descriptions about different modules is available when configuring a linux kernel (like menuconfig) before it's compiled, which is a bit annoying...
As for improved bootspeed, I would say it doesn't make so much difference, with a few exceptions, like the ata_piix module, fore example, but when you start to remove those kind of things, you will remove allot of major hardware support (like losing ata/sata support). The most noticeable bootspeed (and normal performance) improvement would be when running a custom kernel, but most people don't like to have to compile a new kernel whenever newer versions comes out.
But still, good luck!
btw: Jamie, the simples way to find out is to look at the name of the (block) devices representing the drives (and the dmesg output), if, for example, it's just allot of hda1, hdb3 etc, and you don't even see a mention of scsi in dmesg, then you could try removing scsi support (but remember to have a fallback, just in case ), but if you have devices named things like sda1, sdb3 etc, or the dmesg output tells you some drive uses scsi, then don't remove it.