Loading device firmware in kickstart

[John Summerfield]

Matt Fahrner wrote:
> 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.


NO NO. I didn't say to get it working, that's a lot of bother. But to 
replace it with something simplistic, which is what I propose, you need 
to know what it does.
> 
>> 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.

Exactly.

> 
>> 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.

Probably, loading firmware for something that's not there will simply fail.
> 
> 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.

Bear in mind that Fedora doesn't support atheros (or didn't last time I 
looked). The HAL stuff isn't exactly open source.

For those wanting enterprise-grade Linux, look at Scientific Linux.

> 
> 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,

Also remember FC6 has a short life. If you particularly like that level 
of software, look at Scientific Linux which is built from RHEL (like 
CentOS), but has some non-free stuff added. Like proper java, and (I'm 
fairly sure) Madwifi.

If I were installing new Fedora I'd look at Fedora 7.


> 
>             - Matt


-- 

Cheers
John

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