I've got a root server with 1and1 and I'm upgrading to a newer kernel... building it myself. I figured that, as long as I'm going to be compiling it myself, to save compile time and runtime memory usage, I'd like to make the kernel and modules as minimal as possible.
So, the question becomes: Which modules/drivers do I need?
I could look to the current kernel, but it's got a bunch of stuff (not just compiled, but loaded) that I'm pretty convinced isn't really on the hardware (like Dell battery monitor... AND the ASUS battery monitor... parallel port driver, etc.). So, I hesitate to just compile in all of the stuff I see in the output of lsmod.
The motherboard does seem to be nForce-based, so I've got the nVidia SATA stuff all loaded, and the RAID1 driver, so the kernel boots, sees the drives and the network card and seems to be running okay. But now I want to see if there's anything I'm missing.
Anybody have any tips on things to run (lsusb? lspci? Some other pnp querying tools?) and how to interpret them to know what other drivers to compile?