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What’s the difference between insmod and modprobe?

I know insmod and modprobe are used to insert module into the kernel. But, what’s the difference between them?

And, why is it dangerous to insert modules with force option in modprobe?

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Answer

modprobe is the intelligent version of insmod. insmod simply adds a module where modprobe looks for any dependency (if that particular module is dependent on any other module) and loads them.

Regarding --force option, here is the quote from the man page:

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Which indicates it’s been used to skip the kernel module version checking. Shouldn’t be any problem if you do your own kernel module or from any trusted party. But you should know what you are doing.

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