Blacklisting Drivers

Question

What does it mean to blacklist a driver in Linux/Unix? How do you go about doing it?

Answer 1

In openSUSE 11.4 you can find it in the file /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf. At the top you find a description:

Listing a module here prevents modprobe from loading it via modalias (only aliases from /lib/modules/*/modules.alias). You may still load it explicitely. We blacklist some modules because they may harm on certain devices or they prevent other modules from grabbing the device.

On other distributions it should be done similarly. I am not sure if other Unixes support this in the same way.