Drivers, initrd and kickstart

[Hardik Modi]

Here's a bit of an update. I think I got it figured out over the course of
the day and after much trial and error. The driver update disk came with a
pcitable file and stock initrd has a pci.ids file, which I had merged (not a
literal cat, but picked out what appeared to be relevant data). I've now
realized that merging modules.alias is sufficient to have controllers on
both kinds of systems recognized. The changes I made to pci.ids somehow were
okay for the LSI controller but led to the 3ware one not being recognized.

My searches on the Internet don't reveal what I ought to have done, but I'm
back in business, so I'm hoping this proves useful to others in the future.

If somebody on the list can shed more light on the subject, that'd be much
appreciated.

Hardik.

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Hardik Modi
<hardik at statementofpurpose.com>wrote:

> I use kickstart to do mostly-unattended imaging on systems that aren't
> network-connected. This generally works great, but I'm a little puzzled
> about some driver issues I'm facing right now.
>
> The base disk is CentOS 5.3 and the systems are generally SuperMicro and
> IBM xSeries servers. I've just had to add a new megaraid_sas driver to work
> with a new LSI controller. To do this, I took apart the driver update disk
> provided by IBM and in the stock initrd, I replaced the .ko and merged in
> the pci.ids and modules* files. The net effect of all this is that the
> controller is recognized on the IBM system and boots just fine. I do an rpm
> install with the new driver during the post section and the system operates
> correctly there after.
>
> The catch is that I can't boot up a SuperMicro system with the 3ware RAID
> controller with this disk. I don't see the 3w-9xxx and ata-piix drivers
> getting loaded and then it gets stuck at the 'CentOS disk not found' screen.
> Absent my changes, the system boots just fine.
>
> I've spent time looking through the files I've modified and am certain that
> only the LSI information has been added and it's not in conflict with the
> 3ware entries, in terms of IDs and dependencies. modules.cgz and initrd.img
> are both generated files, so I don't see a space issue, the way one might
> have in RHEL/CentOS 4, where you had to dd a fixed block count to generate
> the initrd.
>
> I know the kickstart is getting loaded, so I guess I could force the driver
> to be loaded. I've just realised that I could use the driverdisk option in
> my kickstart file, but I don't have network and I can't see a way to force
> it to pick up the file from the boot disk. I don't want to use separate
> media here, so dd from isolinux isn't really an option.
>
> Any thoughts on a better approach or ideas on what I'm doing wrong?
>
> Regards,
> Hardik.
>
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