@nickbearded

I've heard those laptops with nvidia dual GPU are notoriously difficult to configure correctly, if at all. It's a good idea you've come up with to start on a well known piece of hardware like the rpi. I started my own distro on an odroid C1 and learned the basics on that. Just creating the .config file is hard enough, then you have to worry about how to debug it with a black screen or instantly crashes on bootup. This is why I moved to doing pretty much everything in initrd, to minimize failure points and get actionable debug information.

If you're just trying to build a system for dedicated hardware you probably don't *need* modules. For the longest time I was just building everything into the kernel with modules disabled but this approach had problems when I installed the x86 build onto a macbook. Then moved to a dumb shell script to parse /sys and load modules with 'insmod' (but it had to be run multiple times if there were other module dependencies!). Eventually realized my problem with modprobe was because I didn't run 'depmod' afer building the kernel which modprobe uses to load modules in the correct order.

Now the big issue I've been having recently is certain GPU's requiring firmware to work correctly. Anyway, sorry for the long winded anecdote here, if you run into any issues feel free to send me a message I may have spent days or even weeks on the same problems.