How to disable specific hardware in Linux?

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by mattdocs12345, Apr 24, 2014.

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  1. mattdocs12345

    mattdocs12345 Registered Member

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    In Windows I go to device manager and I can disable touchpad, keyboard, specific CPU cores and other random stuff.
    Is there something like "device manager" for Linux.
     
  2. Gullible Jones

    Gullible Jones Registered Member

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    Boot options exist for such things. Likewise you can edit modprobe.d files to prevent udev from loading problem modules. As a general rule, low-level stuff on Linux is almost always done with plaintext configuration files.

    Why do you want to do this, though? If you are having hardware problems, you should remove or replace the problem hardware.
     
  3. Veeshush

    Veeshush Registered Member

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    There are situations where that'd be handy. I have older boards where you can't actually disable the onboard video (no bios settings, no jumper). In Windows I'd just go to the device manager and disable the driver, but I was never sure how to do it in Linux.
     
  4. mattdocs12345

    mattdocs12345 Registered Member

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    No BIOS doesn't work well for touchpad as it disables both touchpad and trackpoint.
    I want to have GUI low level control of all hardware. Im surprised that linux doesn't have such tool that can access every single hardware.
     
  5. Mrkvonic

    Mrkvonic Linux Systems Expert

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    Post or pre boot?
    Mrk
     
  6. tlu

    tlu Guest

    With lsmod you'll find the loaded kernel modules. You can remove specific modules with modprobe while your system is running - I suggest that you consult man modprobe. If you want to prevent that specific modules are loaded at system start, you can add them to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf .
     
  7. Mrkvonic

    Mrkvonic Linux Systems Expert

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    You can remove modules if they are not in use.
    If they are, a forced removal will result in a nice kernel oops or panic.
    Mrk
     
  8. tlu

    tlu Guest

    This can certainly happen. I think it depends on which module is removed, and it should also make a difference if you use rmmod or modprobe -r because the latter can resolve dependency issues while the first one doesn't.
     
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