INSMOD(8)

💖 INSMOD — the insmod manual, but make it make sense 💖

okay bestie, welcome to insmod(8), part of the kmod crew. buckle up, this one's short and honestly a little chaotic. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

insmod — a simple little program that shoves a module into the Linux Kernel. yes literally. that's the whole personality. 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

insmod [OPTIONS] [filename] [module options]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like. insmod is a trivial program whose entire job is inserting a module into the kernel. that's it. that's the job.

bestie real talk: most of y'all should be using modprobe(8) instead. it's the smarter, more clever one — it actually handles module dependencies for you. insmod does not. it does not care. 💅

and okay, the error reporting? extremely minimal. like, the bare minimum of general error messages, nothing more. because the actual work of trying to link the module now happens inside the kernel, the tea gets spilled by dmesg(1) instead — that's where you go for the real info about what went wrong. 😭

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -f, --force — 🚨 okay this one is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, I'm not being dramatic, it literally says so 🚨 — it tells the kernel to straight up ignore the module version and vermagic fields while loading. with this you can load modules that were built locally or by third parties… but it can also lead to memory corruption, system crashes and data loss. so like. iconic but at what cost. 💀
• -s, --syslog — send errors to syslog instead of standard error. errors go to the group chat instead of your DMs. ✨
• -v, --verbose — print messages about what the program is doing. normally insmod is silent unless something goes wrong, so this is your "not me narrating my own life" mode. 🙈
• -V, --version — show the version of the program and exit. periodt. 👑
• -h, --help — print the help message and exit. the classic. 🎀

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

this manual page originally Copyright 2002, Rusty Russell, IBM Corporation. give them their flowers. 💐

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

modprobe(8), rmmod(8), lsmod(8), modinfo(8), depmod(8)

(yeah go read modprobe(8). it's the main character here, iykyk. 🧚)

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🍓 BUGS 🍓

found something cursed? 🐛 please direct any bug reports to kmod's issue tracker at

https://github.com/kmod-project/kmod/issues/

and bestie, include the version used, the steps to reproduce the problem, and the expected outcome. don't leave us guessing, that's not the vibe. 🫶

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

numerous contributions have come from the linux-modules mailing list <linux-modules@vger.kernel.org> and Github — so many people, so much love. 🥹 if you have a clone of kmod.git itself, the output of git-shortlog(1) and git-blame(1) can show you the authors for specific parts of the project. detective work, slay.

Lucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@gmail.com> is the current maintainer of the project. 👑

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and that's the whole page babes! ✨ this was kmod, dated 2026-10-30, and it's giving INSMOD(8). go forth, insert responsibly, and pls pls pls respect the --force warning. mwah. 💖🎀🦋