why do I have battery, button and ac modules loaded on a desktop machine?

[Mauriat Miranda]

On 3/12/06, Joshua Andrews <josh at wavefood.com> wrote:
> I have found since installing that there are a lot of unused services on
> by default that really don't relate to my machine.

> I don't have any wireless or bluetooth or laptop services that I need
> right away, however even after spending some time to figure out what
> some of these mysterious services related to and turning them off I am
> still seeing modules loaded, that as far as I can tell have nothing to
> do with my system, and I am not even sure where  they are being loaded from.
> I mean, isn't there some way that "hal", or anaconda, can figure out
> whether I am a laptop or a desktop machine and setup the services and
> modules appropriately?

For services, there are pretty decent explanations if you run
system-config-services
However it is very difficult to determine what services the end user
requires or can use. A laptop can technically perform as a server, or
on the other hand a certain desktop can have better acpi/power
management than some older laptops. How could you guess?

As for ACPI, I've always found it odd the way acpi modules are loaded.
Basically if your /proc mounts with the acpi subdirectory, then EVERY
acpi module is loaded, as seen in the following portion of
'/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit' (which is your main "boot script").

# Initialize ACPI bits
if [ -d /proc/acpi ]; then
    for module in /lib/modules/$unamer/kernel/drivers/acpi/* ; do
        module=${module##*/}
        module=${module%.ko}
        modprobe $module >/dev/null 2>&1
    done
fi

So then to control which modules you want loaded, you either
move/delete the modules you don't want from
/lib/modules/$unamer/kernel/drivers/acpi/ or you have to tell rc.local
or some other post setup script to UN-load the modules you don't want.

Is there a better way? Not sure. Could you 'blacklist' the modules you
don't want? Or could you use modprobe.conf to prevent loading?

However, I doubt these (possibly useless) modules would cause any
major harm or performance loss, but then again I usually recompile my
kernel withOUT the useless modules and avoid it anyways.

Mauriat