I noticed after building kernel 2.2.2 that modules were no longer autoloading. I didn't notice with 2.2.0-pre9 (aka 2.2.0-final) because I inadvertently compiled in kmod, and kmod seems to be fine. In 2.2.2 I tried to use kerneld (& didn't include kmod in the kernel) and modules wouldn't autoload. This might be a bug, or it might be because of the module vs modutils clash which I reported separately. I haven't tried cleaning it up & trying again yet.
kerneld doesn't work with 2.2 kernels. If you want autoloading, use kmod,