Kmod: The Kernel Module Loader Kirk Petersen Kmod is a simple replacement for kerneld. It consists of a request_module() replacement and a kernel thread called kmod. When the kernel requests a module, the kmod wakes up and execve()s modprobe, passing it the name that was requested. If you have the /proc filesystem mounted, you can set the path of modprobe (where the kernel looks for it) by doing: echo "/sbin/modprobe" > /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe To periodically unload unused modules, put something like the following in root's crontab entry: 0-59/5 * * * * /sbin/rmmod -a Kmod only loads modules. Kerneld could do more (although nothing in the standard kernel used its other features). If you require features such as request_route, we suggest that you take a similar approach. A simple request_route function could be called, and a kroute kernel thread could be sent off to do the work. But we should probably keep this to a minimum. Kerneld also had a mechanism for storing device driver settings. This can easily be done with modprobe. When a module is unloaded, modprobe could look at a per-driver-configurable location (/proc/sys/drivers/blah) for device driver settings and save them to a file. When a module is loaded, simply cat that file back to that location in the proc filesystem. Or perhaps a script could be a setting in /etc/modules.conf. There are many user-land methods that will work (I prefer using /proc, myself). If kerneld worked, why replace it? - kerneld used SysV IPC, which can now be made into a module. Besides, SysV IPC is ugly and should therefore be avoided (well, certainly for kernel level stuff) - both kmod and kerneld end up doing the same thing (calling modprobe), so why not skip the middle man? - removing kerneld related stuff from ipc/msg.c made it 40% smaller - kmod reports errors through the normal kernel mechanisms, which avoids the chicken and egg problem of kerneld and modular Unix domain sockets