Loading device firmware in kickstart

[Matt Fahrner]

John Summerfield wrote:
> If you want this working during the install, I am not surprised what you 
> do doesn't work.

Me neither really, but you gotta try the easy way first...

> I'm assuming you are booting local media, USB disk, CD or similar.

Actually a hard drive partition. Basically we have a "maintenance" 
partition that we place on each system that can be booted off to 
re-kickstart the system. This allows us both to reinstall a scragged 
system, but also do major upgrades that are too complicated to deal with 
at a multi-user level in an unattended environment.

The later need, which is almost never used, will probably be mitigated 
somewhat by Fedora's capabilities of running OS version upgrades via yum.

> What I would do is explore what the existing scripts do for an installed 
> system, and write and equivalent script to run in %pre.

That's a good idea - thank you. Don't know how easy it would be to get 
the "udevd" junk to work there, but it's worth a try.

> It's a couple of years or more since I looked at this, but as I recall 
> it's fairly simple:
> echo something>somehere to say you want firmware loaded.
> cat firmware >somewhereelse
> echo somethingelse >somewhere to say firmware loading's done.

Or try that, which apparently is what the "udevd" stuff ultimately does 
from my reading.

> The trick is in finding out what to plop where. You don't really need 
> all that general-purpose hardware detection stuff.

True, very true, though we have a (relatively small) variety of hardware 
we have to support so we do need some auto-detection.

Since this seems like a bit of work, and Atheros cards are easy to come 
by, I'm going to punt and try using an Atheros based cards (which are an 
alternative we have to the Intel 2200) and inject "madwifi" drivers into 
the "initrd". The hard part there will be getting the modules to compile 
for the "2.6.18-1.2798.fc6" kernel, that or redo the "modules.cgz" with 
all new modules for a later kernel.

Unfortunately I haven't done this for a while and FC6 is a bit of a 
learning curve. It used to be easier because you could just use the 
"BOOT" kernel config - I have no idea where this is pulled no (it 
appears perhaps to be a generic i586 kernel in "boot.iso" - at least 
generic i586 modules seem to work with it for versioning).

Thanks for your help and good advice John,

			- Matt
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Matt Fahrner                                    2 South Park St.
Chief Systems Architect                         Willis House
Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse               Lebanon, N.H.  03766
Tel: (603) 448-4100 x5150                       USA
Fax: (603) 443-6190                             Matt.Fahrner at COAT.COM
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