I'm a little gun-shy about recompiling my own kernel, but I'm hoping to optimize my modules and hopefully decrease my memory usage a little.

First of all, is there any benefit for not loading modules that aren't useful for a given machine? For example, joydev, psmouse, snd*? Will I free up memory this way?

If I were to prevent something from loading in debian, which syntax is best?

blacklist module_name
alias module_name off

Thanks!

Hi,

I don't know from your post if you know this or not. Just a little heads up. Unless you are using PV-GRUB, your Linode will be using host provided kernels.

Cheers!
Antonio

You're talking about saving a few megabytes, and you'll have to run a custom kernel to do it... That's really not a good trade-off.