how to give your kernel modules higher priority?

[garba]

Finally, I discovered what caused my PC to hand during stage 1 compiling... I have this controller-less PCI NIC (i.e. ADSL "modem") which is very demanding in terms of cpu cycles, ripping me about 10% out of my CPU cycles... when CPU load gets very high, as it does during compiling, I noticed my dsl modem gets disconnected (the bugger sends messages to the console about its state all the time, btw anybody knows how to disable this? it's been useful on this occasion but most of the times it's a pain in the ass, tried the >/dev/null when issuing the insmod command but had no luck) so i was wondering if there's a way to give my modem kernel module a higher priority to prevent this from happening... another solution for me would be getting the stage 1 tarballs beforehand and put them in the /usr/portage/distfiles before launching the script (anybody knows which tarballs i need for the stage 1 install?) but this wont pay off on the long run because ill have the same problem in the future when compiling other stuff... so PLEASE, if anybody knows how to solve this, gimme a shout!
(btw my modem is an itex-based NIC, running on the PPPoA protocol, it took me ages to get it to work, those dudes down at itex wont even release the source code for their hardware, i just have a binary kernel model, sigh, it's larger than the kernel, 1.5MB)
thanks in advance

[garba]

sorry that was "caused my PC to HANG" =)