Ubuntu

blacklisting and "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf"

Asked by Nick Payne

Hello, I am new to Linux so this may be an extremely elementary question... bear with me.

I just installed 9.10 Karmic on a HP Mini 311 laptop. Upon first boot it hung immediately after GRUB. I browsed around the forums and saw that others had a similar problem on the 311. The work-around that was suggested was to append "noload=b43,ssb,b43-pci-bridge" in the GRUB boot commands and once logged in, appending the lines

blackist b43
blacklist ssb
blacklist b43-pci-bridge

in the "the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf" file. So far it has been booting consistently and everything seems to be working ok (although I have not had a chance to test wireless networking yet.)

My questions are: Does blacklisting these degrade any system functionality and/or stability? If I upgrade to future releases of Ubuntu, is the blacklist.conf file overwritten?

I am worried that unless the underlying bugs are fixed in the future, I'll be stuck troubleshooting bootup after every package update. Any perspective on this issue would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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Mark Rijckenberg (markrijckenberg) said : 		#1

Blacklisting those wireless kernel modules will only cause problems, if your HP Mini 311 laptop has a wireless card containing a specific type of Broadcom wireless chipset that needs the b43 driver to function correctly. I am not sure if a future upgrade might overwrite the blacklist.conf file. Better to make a backup of the file.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#2

> Does blacklisting these degrade any system functionality and/or stability?

I guess you gave yourself the answer.
> So far it has been booting consistently and everything seems to be working ok

> If I upgrade to future releases of Ubuntu, is the blacklist.conf file overwritten?

User gets usually asked during upgrade process whether to keep changes.
Backups are recommended anyway, upgrading or not.

In case you'd like to write a testing report.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam
e.g.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/Old/HPMini311

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Olof Kindgren (flamingolof) said : 		#3

My HP mini 311c won't boot even with noload=b43,ssb,b43-pci-bridge
Just to clarify it... should I append these options to the line starting with linux, or should I write a new line (in grub edit mode)?

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