I have been running Debian a few years now but haven't really dug into the proper way to handle kernel modules in regards to auto-loading/unloading (i'll get to this) and the setup of modules.conf.

These are modules that the kernel can load and unload at run time, which means you can add that new device or strange file system without having to rebuild or even restart the kernel. Normally ...

Kernel modules are chunks of code that are loaded ... We can count them like this: Linux provides several commands for listing, loading and unloading, examining, and checking the status of modules.