replacing the kernel used for kickstart.

[Terje Kvernes]

Philip Rowlands <phr at doc.ic.ac.uk> writes:

> On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Terje Kvernes wrote:
> 
> > now, I tried to just replace vmlinuz with a (large) static kernel.
> > this worked, in the sense that the system booted with that kernel,
> > but then the system proceeds to boot from the harddrive, not from
> > the USB pen and hence it doesn't start the kickstart process.
> 
> "boot from harddrive" suggests the initrd isn't being correctly
> picked up. Is it present on the pendrive, next to the kernel? Is the
> bootloader being passed the correct initrd= argument?

  yes.

$ grep -A2 'label linux' syslinux.cfg  ; ls -l static initrd.img 
label linux
  kernel static
  append initrd=initrd.img
-rwx------    1 terjekv  terjekv   2194657 May  5 23:57 initrd.img
-rwx------    1 terjekv  terjekv   1990238 Sep 17 13:17 static

  is there a size problem with the kernel?
 
> > obviously, there is something more than just replacing the kernel
> > that's needed.
> 
> Rather than tapping in at this point, I'd suggest recreating the
> kernel-BOOT package, patched to your liking, and rebuilding
> anaconda.

  well, I need patches for the sk98lin driver, and the last time I
  tried that, the RHEL-kernels produced a huge amounts of rejects for
  things that applied cleanly to pretty much anything in the 2.4 and
  2.6 kernels.  then again, there is a new patch-generator available
  for the driver, I can try that road.  

  but, how would I go about replacing the kernel-BOOT package and
  rebuilding ananconda?
 
> > [1] I'd also need to make the kernel available after the machine
> > boots from the harddrive.
> 
> Patching the kernel SRPM (as above) would also provide this. Did you
> check the kernel-unsupported RPMs; perhaps the hardware you need to
> use is covered by them?

  kernel-unsupported RPMs?  no, I didn't!  thanks for the pointer, but
  the question of application still stands.  I don't really have any
  great need to fiddle with the installation (we do that heavily after
  boot anyway), so I've never really looked much at Anaconda and the
  documentation I've found is mostly geared to edit the installation
  or the packages, not the kernel and the initrd.  :-/

-- 
Terje