Why are there so many entries in modules.dep?
I wonder why there are so many entries in modules.dep when I don’t have that many drivers? I have a plain vanilla Dell Latitude E7450 running Ubuntu 16.04 and my modules.dep lists hundreds of dependencies. Are really that many necessary? All thos can’t be drivers so what is it more that is implemented as a module and listed by modules.dep?
modules.dep lists the dependencies of every single module available on your system, not just those which are in use on your system. It also lists modules which have no dependencies, which adds to its length. Distribution kernel packages typically have thousands of modules nowadays, so it’s perfectly normal for modules.dep to have thousands of lines (one per available module).
Kernel modules provide a variety of services: they can contain hardware drivers, common code shared by a number of drivers, file systems…