Driver disk questions

[Jay Cliburn]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 08:38:28AM +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
> 
> For a driver disk to be recognized as such by anaconda, it needs far
> more than the module itself to be present. You might take a look at the
> Advansys driver disk I made to support installation of FC1, FC3, and
> FC4:
> 
> http://www.city-fan.org/ftp/contrib/drivers/advansys/

Thanks Paul.  I neglected to state in the OP that I had constructed the
requisite files into an image that was transferred to the floppy, but I 
was confused as to whether the .o or the .ko should be included in the 
modules.cgz file.  Some references on the web, and even a "build a driver
disk" script from Via Technologies, include only the .o file, and that
seems counterintuitive.  In the end, I included both.  (Still doesn't 
work, though.)  I also used your and Pasi's June 2006 exchange on 
fedora-list relating to this topic as one of my references.

> 
> However, it is possible to manually load the driver if all you have is
> the .ko file. See for example:
> 
> http://www.keffective.com/mvsata/

Thanks for this.  I ran across it early in my information search, but I 
didn't realize its significance until just now with your comment.  I'll 
try this method this evening when I get home.

> You could save yourself a lot of hassle by building the module as an
> "out of tree" driver using the approach described in the release notes.

Yes, I tried doing that, but near as I can tell, the Makefile provided 
in the release notes assumes you're building a module against an installed 
kernel, which I'm not, and I couldn't quite figure out how to modify the 
Makefile to make it work for me.  What is the equivalent to KDIR in the
case where a module is built against a non-installed kernel?

obj-m := foo.o

KDIR  := /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build
PWD   := $(shell pwd)

default:
	$(MAKE) -C $(KDIR) M=$(PWD) modules

Thank you,
Jay