You spend all morning blacklisting a problematic driver in modprobe.d, verify it with lsmod, and feel confident that the system is finally stable. Then you reboot, and there the module is, staring back at you from the output of lsprobe like it never left. I have spent enough nights chasing hardware stability to know that the kernel often has its own ideas about what modules are mandatory.

The initramfs is lying to your kernel

The issue is rarely the configuration files themselves. The real culprit is the initramfs image, which often bakes in module dependencies during the last update. If your system runs dracut or mkinitcpio, that local config in /etc/modprobe.d is ignored until the kernel is well past the initial boot phase. By then, the hardware has already initialized, and your driver is already active.

dracut -f --omit-drivers 'bad_module_name'

• Check /etc/dracut.conf.d/ if you are running RHEL or Fedora derivatives
• Inspect the kernel command line for modprobe arguments that might be overriding your local blacklists
• Verify if the module is built-in by checking /boot/config-$(uname -r) for a hardcoded y

Before you spend another hour fighting the kernel, force a rebuild of the initramfs after every blacklist change. If the module still insists on loading, grep through /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.dep to see if another module is pulling it in as a soft dependency. That hidden connection is exactly how these drivers keep coming back from the dead.