Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
Is there a tangible advantage? Well, it's possible that a module sitting around unused might have a vulnerability ... but if your cracker is already to the point where they can load modules, you're probably hosed, anyway. Unless you're working with very tight resources, I'm not aware of a real advantage. Anyone? I would have thought everything you need should be in the stock kernel, too, but I don't use them, so I don't know.
Well, I suspect the Kernel Gods prune bits out of the kernel because they offend their sensibilities (DFSG). I've not actually confirmed this, but I got that impression from something I read, and it's believable.
Consider some card that has loadable firmware.An Alacatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem is one such device, the prism54-based wireless cards too. Oh, IBM also has OCO (object-code-only) drivers.
Possibly some drivers might make their way into the kernel, and I think some have. You can be pretty sure that the Debian Kernel people will remove them.
Also, some vendors (and I don't know whether Debian is one) do/did not build the NTFS driver (unstable, prone to damaging date) or HPFS (dunno why, but since I no longer have any OS/2 disks I care about I've not bothered about it). If you want those, you get to build it yourself.