disable kernel driver at boot?

[sfp]

Google & the handbook hasn't helped on this one...

Is it possible to disable a driver compiled into a 4.10 kernel at boot time by feeding a (set?) command to the loader?

In this case I want to turf the EM(4) driver that was compiled into the kernel I've inherited and substitute it with a new if_em.ko using kldload.

I don't have the option of recompiling the kernel to exclude EM(4).  Any chance this can be achieved by specifying a kernel.conf sans EM(4)... but that leads to the question of how I'd construct said kernel.conf given that I only have the kernel and nothing else to work with.

Thanks in advance.