Re:Why were the modutils changed? (Score 1)

Aparently this all started when a kernel developer (Rusty Russell) attempted to resolve some race condition in the module unloader and ended up porting all user space module loading stuff (insmod etc) into the kernel. Now insmod can be written in 20 lines of c (while it was over 2000 lines of code).

You can read all about this in an interview with Rusty Russell at Kerneltrap.org.