A new video card was added to a customer workstation. To get the new video card to work correctly, a systems administrator needs to remove support for the nouveau video driver on the Linux…

rmmod removes a loaded kernel module from memory; the -f (force) flag bypasses the in-use check that would otherwise block removal if the module is still referenced. This immediately unloads nouveau from the live kernel without requiring a reboot, allowing the new video card driver to initialize and function correctly in the current session.

modprobe -R is the flag for resolving a module alias to a module name, not for removing a module - the correct removal flag for modprobe is lowercase -r.

Adding a blacklist entry to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf prevents the module from loading on subsequent boots but does nothing to unload a module that is already active in the running kernel.

/etc/modprobe.conf is a deprecated configuration file location superseded by the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory structure, and entries placed there are not reliably processed by modern kernels.