Linux Administration Cookbook

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You can dynamically load and unload modules, as well as manually blacklist certain ones from loading at all.

This can come in handy if you have a particular piece of hardware that's faulty, and/or causes a Kernel Panic (the kernel ceasing to function entirely and crashing).

To blacklist a module, it's simply a case of adding it to a blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d/:

$ echo "blacklist e1000" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

In the previous example, I blacklisted e1000. Clearly, this is going to cause me problems as it means my network card won't have appropriate drivers at boot, but it made the system more secure!